Category: personal growth

Magical moments

The sky is a deep gray, almost black, with a hint of deep violet peaking through underneath.  The ambient light from the city is too persistent for the sky to ever hit a pure black note.  I drive across town at night more often these days, and there is this perfect moment that I capture almost every time.  Music has a certain quality when played in the car, it fills up the whole space with no apologies and you can lose yourself in it.  Usually when I feel as though I am losing myself in a sensation, I dissolve, which is what makes these moments so special.  With the sultry violins and deep drum tempos of viking metal, or Alice Cooper wailing out a song of heartbreak, or a bagpipe helping tell a story of a war once lost in Ireland, the music takes hold and gently guides my thoughts, and then I hit this magic point where the city around me crystallizes.  Suddenly everything is starkly clear. The colonial buildings with their discordant Victorian touches, some neglected and left to crumble after standing a hundred years, they are beautiful to me in this moment.  The city is trapped between buildings of rich living history, new cold modern growth, and the constant decay that permeates the low income neighborhoods of every town.  It feels raw, each person in the street with their own story, each brick laid by human hands, and driving through the puddles that muddy up the streets I feel a connection to everything around me.  I belong in the country, but the haunting quality of the city at night captures me in those moments every time.  There is an endless feeling of loneliness and connection in those moments.  Every time I lose myself in the feeling of realness, of a world with such clarity where the sights and smells and emotions overwhelm, I feel alive with a vibrating intensity.  It is a specific moment that I only seem able to capture in the city alone, with the music blaring, as humanity unfolds around me.  Somehow despite my life being filled with so many brilliant people who bring me joy and love, and so many exciting adventures and new growth, I cherish these moments just as highly.  They feel like magic.

There are other magical moments in my life.  Ones where the whole world seems perfectly in place, everything gains that shiny extra-real character, and being alive is the most wonderful thing.  I want to freeze the moment I felt when I found the perfect coffee cup, when I held it and knew it was just right.  I was bent on minimalism at the time, still am in my way, but that perfectly crafted material object that was completely the opposite of every style I normally like, fit into my hand perfectly and just gave me such profound joy.  A fucking coffee cup.  Every time I use it, I get a shadow of that moment replayed, and it enhances my day, subtly lifting it a bit above ordinary.

Once when walking I saw a patch of daylilies growing over someones garden fence.  I stopped and just stared while people walked by, I had forgotten the color orange could be so beautiful and intense.  I suppose depression plays a factor, maybe most people live in a world that is bright all the time, but I know that mine won’t always be and hasn’t always been.  The precious jewel of a moment where a flower becomes the center of the world and can take my breath away, I cherish that.

Lately I’ve recognized there magical moments more and more.  It started with driving home across town at night more often.  My life changed radically when a partnership that had centered around cohabitation suddenly became one of distance.  It was a good change, one that strengthened that relationship, and also pushed me into a focus on my own personal growth, but it was a hard change.  And nightly drives alone became a familiar trend, after I spent the day laughing with him at his father’s home where he now lived, or dropped him off after a day at our home where he still spends near half his time. Those magical moments when driving back happened more, and it clicked in my head that this was not something that had to be an infrequent gift of chance.  I could learn to cultivate these moments, but really immersing myself in my experiences and welcoming the world in.  I could learn to live in moments of beautiful clarity, feeling vibrantly alive wasn’t a passing fancy anymore.

Redefining boundaries and raising expectations

Sometimes people surprise you.  I’ve been polyamorous for just about my entire life, and a relationship anarchist as well for the last few years.  I don’t think I’ve ever been without a few partners or loves, though I only recently connected with my local polya community.  As such, I’ve been involved with a lot of people who had been monogamous before and tried polyamory for the first time when getting involved with me.  I’ve also been with a lot of people who had few relationships before me at all, but since we are raised in a society that normalizes monogamy, that is how they imagined their first relationships would be structured.  There are a lot of pitfalls when getting involved with someone who has absorbed institutionalized monogamous ideals and has not done the work to unpack those.  I was one of those people once, despite being polya from pretty much my first dynamics, and only experimenting with a couple mono relationships for a short time in my teenage years.  There was a shit ton of work to do and societal brainwashing to unpack, work that took me many years and a lot of heartbreaks to get through.  I hit a point where after I had done a lot of that work, I was understanding of what it took and tried to help a number of partners through that as well. I was new once after all, now I could work with others going through similar things and take on a sort of mentor role.

Several shit shows later, maybe a bit more then several, I was ready to wash my hands of all that.  I found a boundary, I did not want to get involved with people who had not already gotten to at least somewhere near the point I was at.  I would not get involved with monogamous people, or people who had no prior experience with polyamory or relationship anarchy. If someone was monogamous but willing to try polyamory or relationship anarchy, I fully supported that, but I wasn’t the test subject for that experiment because I did not have the energy for another dynamic in which they would find they couldn’t manage it after we’d done a year or more worth of emotional labor trying to make it work.  It probably didn’t help the divide that most of the polya people I knew had also studied non-violent communication and developed good emotional intelligence and self-awareness as a necessary part of making polyamory work for them, and most of the monogamous-want-to-try-polya folks I knew were learning those skills along-side with also exploring a whole new way to relationship.

So I made that boundary for myself, and my next couple dynamics were really very smooth in comparison to the ones before.  Instead of fighting and yelling and pushing away attempts at control, or getting drawn in and engaging in screaming matches I was later ashamed of, there were a couple years of calm conversations when problems arose, and good beginning talks about what agreements we would have that encouraged a respect for autonomy of all of those involved.  It was fucking lovely! In a previous dynamic with a my ex fiancé (a mono oriented person who was willing to “allow” me to be polya but didn’t have interest in being so himself, and never learned to communicate well or unpack a lot of societal mono baggage), when he cheated I found out after months of dishonesty, and couldn’t grok why he had not just told me that he had wanted to see someone else as well.  I mean to be honest, I had not created the best environment for honesty, we had a whole bucket full of other problems in our dynamic, but the cheating was a bad situation that exploded and he never communicated well through that, or through the eventual dissolution of our relationship that followed.  In contrast, I got involved with Witty, a person who had been looking at and trying polyamory for a while before we got involved, and had spent years figuring it out, along with learning effective communication and interpersonal skills to make it work.  He cheated as well, but it was a case of miscommunication, there was no attempt at deception at all following the fact.  We discussed it quite calmly, redefined our relationship agreements to prevent future mishaps, and the word was fairly hunky dory after that.  I could see pretty clearly the benefits of dating people who understood relationshipping in ways that suited what I was looking for, and had put in time an energy to be effective at it, same as I had after years of mistakes.

I was a happy little polya panda a couple years in to my new easy life, assured that this boundary had significantly lowered the drama level in my relationships and that it was the –right choice-.  Then I met Hoffy, who from almost the first conversation, showed me a level of openness and vulnerability I rarely see even from my dearest friends. He was inquisitive, forthright, and asked me a lot about the way I relationship in a frank and non-judgmental way that made it easy to open up.  I decided fairly quickly that every rule has an exception.  I often feel an extreme amount of hesitancy getting in any new relationship, which I’ve talked about here, but I was more certain I wanted to explore things with him than I had been about any life decision in over a decade.  I suppose sometimes you just know, because I am continually amazed at how that dynamic has progressed.  The level of openness and honesty has only deepened over time, and thus far there hasn’t been a single roadblock we couldn’t overcome, relating to polyamory or otherwise.  Since I’ve begun writing here we’ve often discussed our thoughts on the topics I’ve covered, and I again find myself even more amazed that someone raised in the same culture as me with mononormative structures, who hadn’t had any experience of polya relationships beforehand, could be so functionally excellent at making it work.  Thinking about it in more depth, I realize that the things that were lacking in my previous relationships with new-to-polya folks were often not their relationship experience in particular, but the communication skills, emotional intelligence, and self-awareness that often developed after more experience.  I fought tooth and nail against myself, against other partners, against societal ideas I had absorbed, to develop those.  I told myself that it was okay that I was a work in progress and that it took many years of brutal fuck ups to reach where I was now, and it was also okay to expect a certain standard from others because I no longer had the spoons to teach someone who was starting at the beginning when I was miles along the journey.  So what did it mean to find someone who was jogging along right beside me but hadn’t gotten there with a trail of messy broken relationships behind?  It raised my standards.  I suddenly realized that you know what, it actually is possible for someone to be compassionate, understanding, a gentle communicator, devoted to honesty and openness, from the very beginning.  There are people like that, or at least I had found one, and maybe that meant I hadn’t deserved all the shit and abuse heaped on from previous people who didn’t measure up to that.  Conversely that meant that I had no excuses for my previous behavior.  Being inexperienced wasn’t an excuse, and while I am admittedly very frank about how shitty I used to be, I needed to take even more responsibility for that.  I could have gone about everything very differently from the start, and I didn’t, but I knew now that it was possible.

So sometimes people surprise you.  I still have that boundary for myself, although I have tweaked it some. I am only willing to get involved with people who show they can express themselves with honesty and in a non-violent way, who are aware of their wants and needs and aren’t smuggling in secret expectations under them, and who are self-aware and emotionally intelligent in ways that fit with the complex nature of the way I relationship.  People who also question society and its more harmful messages, who are willing to think outside of the box, those are people who I feel may be able to relationship well with my unconventional way of doing things.  I hold myself to higher and higher standards, and I recognize that I deserve to be treated just as well.  I can be compassionate to what I went through and why I was a grade A shitbird, and have that compassion for my previous partners, while still living up to higher ideals today and seeing that mirrored in the people in my life now.  I’m glad I took the chance that I did, sometimes it is good for even the most important stands you take to have the possibility for exceptions, a little fluidity and wiggle room can lead to the greatest growth.

 

Learning to be alone

The thing they don’t tell you about learning to be alone with yourself is how much you’re going to love it.  It’s terrifying at first. When you’ve lived your life being co-dependent from one relationship to the next, the idea of being alone with yourself is a horrifying proposition.  When you have lived in a manic frenzy where you seek out social situations like a drug, always surrounding yourself with noise and raucous laughter so the emptiness inside doesn’t consume you, you are sure that by yourself you are going to eat yourself alive from the inside. You know how it works, you’re alone for a moment and the silence creeps in, the thoughts of despair and fear overwhelm you and suddenly it’s a rush to find the loud comfort of other people or self-destruct.

I don’t know how I learned to be safely alone with myself.  For years being alone meant my thoughts on paper airplanes as the world spun around me because I hadn’t eaten in days.  It meant fresh red lines on my skin and painting in my own blood as the clarity of pain showed me I was alive.  I don’t know why being alone made me spiral into self-destruction in the first place.  I didn’t hate myself, but I sure as hell didn’t know how to stand my own company.

Somewhere along the line I destroyed a series of relationships, or they destroyed me.  I drank, I yelled, I was hit and cheated on, I became a fucking caricature of a mess to the point that looking back I feel like I had to have made up that much unmitigated drama even though I lived it with these bones.  I met someone with the sort of fierce independence I mistook as loneliness and isolation because it was so foreign to me, but one day recognized as a fire of strength that I had just never known.  He pushed me into an empty bed, I had to know and understand how it was someone could be happier sleeping alone.

I learned the silky comfort of cold sheets with no body beside me to warm me.  I learned how magical it felt to stretch myself across a bed that belonged to me alone, and then to stretch my mind as well now that my thoughts were my own and not owned by the noise of the crowd.  I learned the sounds of a winter morning and how peaceful they could be when a walk through the snow was a solitary adventure spent on noticing the way the sunlight found new patterns through bare tree branches.  It was so different from previous walks in a biting chill with a cigarette taking the place of two days worth of missed meals and the emptiness in my stomach mirrored in the emptiness of my mental fog.  Words like self-care are the narrative of my generation, and the first time I cooked myself an elaborate meal that was only for me I understood what it meant to really care for myself.

I spent years feeling confident because I did not hate myself, I thought myself fantastic and saw the affection I garnered in others. I knew attention, love was never far behind.  I could simultaneously give no fucks about what others thought, while affirming myself with compliments and admiration.  To learn to be alone I had to go beyond affirmation and the love of others.  Not hating myself, having a high opinion of my worth, that was not the same as self-love.  Thinking you are hot shit, that isn’t really loving yourself.  I learned love as an action, not just a detached emotion.  The nights I spend alone wrapped in cool sheets and taking up space with a body I am finally comfortable in, the days I stop to watch a sunrise with only the dogs for company, the times I decide to make a luscious meal from scratch that only I will taste, I act out of love and I can feel at home being alone.

He is my hero – on having a partner with disabilities

When I first got involved with someone fifteen years my senior, a smoker, an alcoholic, with a history of mental disorders, I wasn’t really thinking about how health would effect our lives.  The deeper I fell in love with him, the more my crippling fear of loss made me worry about losing him, because statistically I knew that based on age alone he was likely to die before me.  I knew that you can never really know with life though, you can be two people in perfect health and in your prime, and lose someone to a car accident or mass shooting.  Life is never certain, and I dealt with my fears as best I could, though every day the thought of living without him someday haunts me and I hope that day never comes.  What I didn’t consider though was what happens along the way, how health is a fickle thing and can deteriorate in ways you don’t expect.

It’s eight years after we met and fell in love. I sit on a stool that gives a little when I move, and subdue the urge to bounce and swivel back and forth with the manic energy that so often inhabits my body.  I watch him lying flat on his back, straining to lift his leg up off that table at the physical therapists office.  One leg lift is a hard won feat, the ten that are asked of him make his face crease with intense pain and determination and he is breathing hard when he finishes the final one.  They say the cartilage in his knees is just gone, I know this means that despite the exercises, this new knee pain is now one more constant in his life.  We can tally it up with the back pain, the leg pain, the carpal tunnel, the constant headaches, the tremors, the memory loss and blackouts, and all the fucked up mental states that come and go. I think about how I’m starting to get pangs of pain here and there, my knees aching and cracking from time to time from a few years at jobs where I knelt on concrete while restraining large dogs as a vet tech.  I have a bit of a headache, probably didn’t drink enough water this morning, and that is enough to distract me and throw me off my game for the day.  I can’t imagine pain that is exponentially worst, being a constant background noise in my life.  This is the one area in which we don’t understand each other perfectly, because I have no frame of reference.

When I found out he was bi-polar I wasn’t phased.  We grew closer because of it, having the same condition and realizing how easy it was to relate to the spiraling mood shifts that could last months or years and change the color of the whole world for that time.  When I talked him past a period of suicidal ideation not long after we first met, I could see myself in him, I’d walked that path too many times on my own.  I wanted him to see he didn’t need to walk it alone, I committed to always be there through that.  As we grew close we revealed shattered pasts of trauma and abuse, our stories profoundly different, but our understanding of the invisible scars we each had was the same.  He overcame his alcoholism within the first six months after we met, mine persisted for a few years longer before I decided it was time, and with his borrowed strength I came out the other side.  We had our difficulties where mental health played a role, but there was always an undercurrent of empathy, understanding, and kinship.  I never doubted we could handle any of those curve balls that life threw at us, capricious manic moods, depressive spells, unexpected trauma triggers, we could take it.

The first time I got a call from his doctor at school to let me know they had sent him to the hospital, suspecting a heart attack, my world dropped away.  My fears of losing him went from background noise to a constant cacophony that disrupted every day functioning.  After a time it receded again to a background murmur, but always louder then it had been prior. It wasn’t a heart attack that time, although if it had been it would not have been his first.  Doctors, an ever growing list of medications, and a longer list of diagnoses, followed over the years.  This month we add a rheumatologist, we’ll have to figure out where they fit in with the neurologist, psychiatrist, urologist, cardiologist, endocrinologist, pulmonologist, and any others we’ve seen over the years or are now a constant part of life.  Assistive devices became normal, the glasses after the stroke in his left eye, the cane when his balance got worse, the handicap placard when the constant back and leg pain made walking long distances prohibitive.  When we met, we had more in common in our respective illnesses of the mental persuasion, but as more physical disabilities have entered his life in a steady march, I can’t relate to what he goes through because I have no lived experience to match.

He brings me flowers.  Going to the store is never easy, not with the panic attacks from being out around a lot of strangers, the pain with walking, the shortness of breath, the constant exhaustion.  I can’t function with a mild headache, his daily background is so much more then I think I could ever handle, and he bears it to bring me flowers just to see me smile.  He plays with his nephew, wrestling around knowing that it will cost him, that it means days of increased pain and less ability to devote the little energy he has to doing the few things that keep him sane.  He does it because he always puts others first and loves to bring them joy.  He sees himself as selfish because of how he withdraws when it all gets to be too much, and I see the selflessness in every time he pushes his body a little too far just to make someone else smile, knowing he’ll pay for it for days.

I go into nursing.  I love my job working with animals, but human medicine pays more and I know that I’ll be the one supporting us, and maybe I can learn skills that will help me better take care of him.  I try and help him advocate for his boundaries with me, to learn after a lifetime of short relationships with poor communication how to say no and express when something is too much.  I offer comfort, knowing I can’t take away all the pain, but wishing desperately that I could, and instead giving the little bit I can that barely makes a dent in it all. Our polycule is there, always understanding, always asking what they can do to make his life easier.  They are a constant source of compassion when he isn’t able to make a birthday because the pain is too great or the mental fog won’t clear that day.  My parents treat him like family, never commenting on me choosing someone so much older or with so many problems, but cheering him on as he fights the system for years to get disability.  With my own history of trauma, I am amazed at the love and empathy and support that is a stable source of comfort, so grateful for such wonderful people in our lives.

I sit there watching him struggle to lift his leg at the physical therapist, the pain creasing his face.  The laugh lines at the corners of his eyes that crinkle up when he smiles, a feature he hates because it shows his age but I love because it shows how much of his time is spent flashing that brilliant smile and laughing his laugh that lights up the room; those are lines of pain in this moment as he pushes through the exercise.  My manic fidgety energy calms for a moment and all I can think is how he is my hero.  I’ve been the stable one, the one who supports us, who guides us through the problems we’ve faced, but I’m not the strong one.  I know he breaks down and cries because he feels so weak.  I wish he could see himself through my eyes.  He is the man who brings me flowers, who plays with his nephew, who shares his most vulnerable moments of trauma, who inspired me into a career path I am now passionate about, who taught me a level of compassion I didn’t know possible, who makes me feel safe, and who has the strength to handle pain and adversity that many would crumble under.  He is the man I fear losing more then anything else because I can’t see a world without him.  I didn’t know what I would be getting into eight years ago when we met, and I also didn’t know heroes existed back then, but now I know they do, and I would never trade the time I share with mine for anything in the world.

Not every relationship lasts forever – learning to appreciate the beauty in endings and change

IMG_20181216_105415_953

Dead flowers are absolutely beautiful to me. There is a point at which they stop blooming and start getting darker and dryer, and they freeze in time.  They hit a point where they are brittle and fragile, but they don’t completely decay, they are frozen in a moment past their prime and stop changing at a rate that you can see from day to day.  That imperfect beauty is haunting to me, even something that has used up all it’s energy and potential for growth can still be aesthetically pleasing. They stay lovely for much longer when they are dead then they ever did while alive, still adding a morbid beauty to a room that can last for years before they inevitably crumble into shapeless organic matter, and even that can provide nutrients for new growth.

I didn’t like getting flowers for the longest time, I felt betrayed by the lifelessness of them.  It seemed sad, a burden to get something with a clock ticking down to the end of it’s life. They had been picked, they were no longer part of something living, but they were still alive for a short while longer. Once they were cut, the rest of their life was ticking down to their eventual death, but that death was a shadow that was so close now, visible in every facet of their beauty.  I couldn’t see the worth in something that had such a clear and obvious end stamp on it, a short term pleasure that would be over after one brief glorious bloom of color and brightness.

I felt the same way about relationships, my measure for success was often longevity.  I endured years in relationships that were toxic and incompatible because I knew that I had to make it work or else we had failed.  I remember when I finally broke up with my girlfriend Nova, we had been fighting almost daily for years, since a few months after the relationship had began.  We had done so much damage to each other, she had cheated, I had been controlling, she had lied repeatedly, I had gotten nasty and slung insults, and it culminated in a night where she hit me during one of our fights and I was just done.  I spoke to my other partners after, told them I thought this was finally it and I had to end things, it had gone to far.  They said it had gone to far a long time ago, it shouldn’t have taken the abuse becoming physical on her part for us to split, we had been emotionally abusing each other for years. They told me how they had been trying to be supportive, but watching us hurl ourselves at each other in a furious battle of passion and anger for years had been so devastating and stressful that they had almost walked away from it all and me with it, just to be out of the chaos. I hadn’t known the effect it was having, but it shook me.  I had almost torn down my whole world at the time just to try and maintain a relationship that was an exploding star, brilliantly bright as it imploded, but obvious to everyone else it was about to consume us in a black hole.  Even during the relationship, we had recognized the parts of it that were unhealthy and the cause of most of our fights, and had talked about ending those parts and transitioning to another type of dynamic, but each time one of us suggested that, the other would fight it vehemently, though we both knew it would have been the healthier option.  The idea of losing something, of part of our dynamic changing, disappearing, was too painful a loss to bear.  We didn’t want something dead, something gone, a constant reminder of what once was and could have been.  We didn’t want the end of one part of the dynamic that so early on was clearly not working, to be the dead flowers on our mantle. So instead we burnt it all to the ground.  Looking back, a relationship with dead flowers, where a part of our dynamic that had been given as a gift but had ended and was only left to look at and remember the beauty of, would have been better then us burning the whole fucking house down.

I’m not sure when exactly it changed, but I’ve learned to love getting flowers.  I love the moment where they are presented, the brilliant colors and softness of the petals, the perfume of life at it’s peak.  I love enjoying the brightness they bring, and their heady scents that transform the whole atmosphere of a room.  I love the slow death and decay, and that moment where they have past their peak and are now dark and dry and haunting, but still beautiful.  I adore dead flowers, lovely in a different way then they were when alive, but no longer sad to me, no longer a burden of something gone so quickly.

I feel differently about relationships these days as well.  I do value longevity when it makes sense, in the same way I value an herb garden that renews each year just as much as I value the dead roses on my alter.  I do not measure the success of a relationship based on how long it lasts though.  I am happy to go into dynamics that I recognize may not be permanent, and endings and change are not a thing I fear to a point that I would rather endure pain or abuse or toxicity rather then face them.  These days when I begin a relationship, I am honest to myself and to my partner that it may not last forever and that is okay, we focus on making it functional and enriching and healthy for us both, rather then making it endure.  When problems arise we work through them, and we lay out all options on the table.  Compromise, finding mutual understandings, accepting each others boundaries, changing expectations, talking through hardship, these are all viable options.  Ending a part or all of the dynamic, transitioning the dynamic to something different, allowing for the death of one thing and even the possibility that it may nourish the growth of another, these are all viable options as well.  Some of my most beautiful and enriching dynamics these days are ones that started out with entirely different structures and parameters, but were allowed to organically change over time.  I no longer try to fight change as though it were an enemy to be conquered or a failure to be avoided.  I no longer avoid relationships that may not last forever either, and I love receiving flowers now even though they will die, and in both I now have so many more beautiful things in my life then I did before.

One more thing has changed, as I said at the beginning, I still find flowers to be beautiful and appealing after they have died. It used to be when relationships ended, I would plow forward into the next one, needing my fix of something vibrant and at it’s peak of life.  I like looking at my dead flowers now, and I also enjoy looking back at the relationships that have ended, the ones that peacefully decayed, and the ones where we burnt the fucking house down around us.  There is so much to be learned, so much personal growth to be had, and so much tragic beauty in pain and parting of ways.  I am not afraid of it anymore, I don’t mind sitting with my pain and the ways in which I royally fucked up.  I made so many mistakes and I allow myself that now, I can be an imperfect person who was fragile and brittle and broke all over people who deserved much better.  I can become a stronger and more resilient person, one who grows sturdy roots and renews myself in healthier soil, but I can look back at my dead flowers and my lost loves and remember those lovely moments in the sun and the dark ones as we fought decay.  There is nothing wrong with the passage of time, with endings and beginnings and short lived loves.  I like to examine my past, I don’t wallow in it, but I open my eyes and allow myself to see it.  And I do really love dead flowers and all the life they remind me of.

A maelstrom of confidence and self doubt

It is hard to feel authentic.  I don’t see myself as a person that struggles with self confidence, I have a great measure of confidence in my opinion, but I have also realized I have a great measure of self doubt.  I always see a lack of self confidence portrayed as thinking poorly of yourself, self hatred, having low self esteem.  I don’t feel like I have low self esteem, I don’t find myself to be unlovable and quite to the contrary, I think I’m pretty damn fantastic.  I adore myself for being a quirky, loud, queer, oddball of a dude.  Lately though, I’ve been struggling with impostor syndrome and feeling like maybe I am not good -enough- or not real enough.

Part of the issue seems to be a feeling of lacking authenticity.  I often have a lot of complicated feelings in my mind, many lines of thought and emotion going on at one time.  It isn’t always possible to express all of that, sometimes I lack the time, sometimes I lack the words, sometimes it isn’t all relevant.  When I give someone a window into how I’m feeling or thinking, but they are just getting to see the part of the scenery visible through that window and missing the whole landscape, I feel inauthentic.  I also feel there is a lot in my mind that isn’t appropriate to express, that I want some measure of privacy for, or that does not fit with the person I am working on becoming. I know I have a right to some measure of privacy, but it contrasts starkly with the version of radical honesty I once practiced.  I also feel that in writing, I want to bare my soul, allow light into all of the dark cracked places of my mind, but it is hard to do so without feeling raw and open in a painful and violated way.  I almost have a desire to be the instrument of my own violation at times, to rip away everything I can hide behind and feel exposed in ways that make me intensely uncomfortable, as though that pain may be a release or way to rebuild.  It also could be terribly unhealthy though, so I dip a toe in here and there, testing the waters of pushing my own limits.

Lately in my life I have found a sense of community and of acceptance in various circles, and that gives me a feeling of home and of comfort that I have craved for a long time.  Like everything I experience though, it seems to be on a pendulum, my emotions swinging back and forth, back and forth.  I feel loved, accepted, a sense of belonging, and with that comes heightened energy and a zealous leap into my sense of self and identity that is -too much- to express in some avenues of life.  I can be a fabulous outspoken beacon of queerness when among my amazingly accepting social circles, a part of me that is not at home when at school or work or in the brightly lit aisles of the grocery store.  I feel alive and electric, able to dance and flail around in all my manic rainbow glory.  And then the pendulum swings back and I wonder if I’m pigeon holing myself into another narrow identity. I try and describe myself, I see the person I am in any one environment, and I feel like I am a person of a thousand faces, some more authentic then the others, but none truly whole. Sometimes I want to gasp for air, broken on the ground, unsure of how any person can be themselves when yourself is too much to be.  Then I feel more self-doubt because how can one person be so fucking melodramatic and still be real.

It’s a funny thing, confidence mixed with self doubt. Knowing you are someone you yourself can adore, but not feeling seen.  Feeling seen too much, but only through a window.  Feeling naked and raw, and still too private and closed off. Feeling alive and bursting with life and then so unsure of your realness that you worry you’ll disappear into a shadow and fade away.  Wondering if anything in your mind makes any sense, if its a mania fueled daydream, if you’ve regressed to a melodramatic teenager, or if this is just your normal.  Hearing that emotions are valid, but not being certain that these particular emotions are, or even if they are emotions at all.  I wonder if this is all too personal.

Much of my life is focused around emotional and personal growth, learning, and trying to help others.  I give advice and can relate experiences shared with me with ones in my past.  I try and connect the dots to tell a story, to write about what I know of a thing and maybe offer that up as a living sacrifice of words.  Then I realize fuck, I don’t actually have much of the knowledge base for this.  I haven’t spent the last ten years doing historical research that makes me an expert or even a novice in this subject.  I have the sentences spinning in my mind that I’ve gleaned from reading this article and that, I have the lived experience of one small person in a vast world.  I feel like an impostor.  I read about impostor syndrome being all too common and how to fight it.  I think about how maybe that applies to people with a wealth of knowledge far greater on my own.  I toy with not caring, pushing forward anyway and putting my voice out there with a stubborn resilience.  I wonder again if that voice has worth.

I am left thinking, am I real?  Who is this person I have become that speaks and writes and is never good enough? I hear reassurance, I don’t want reassurance, I don’t even know if I want confirmation or understanding.  Sometimes there are just too many thoughts, too many faces, and too many questions in my head and I want them to have somewhere to go.  I don’t know if I can reach a point where I do feel authentic and honest and raw, but there is a need for it inside me and this is an avenue to try.

It was short lived, it was toxic, it was still a success

The longest relationship I’ve ever been in celebrated eight years last month. We have not had a titled dynamic that entire time, in fact we don’t now, although I often use the word “partnership” to describe it.  But we lack an official label, we just use a variety of descriptive ones as necessary or relevant to the conversation at hand.  I have actually had longer dynamics as well, though I don’t count them as the longest because while for example I’ve known one of my loves for about twelve years now, we’ve varied in closeness over that time and been out of touch for periods.  With Kelev, who I’ve been with for eight years, we’ve been a pretty integrated part of each others daily lives for that time.  Of course I am not trying to devalue relationships that are comet shaped, that is to say where the person passes in and out of orbits of closeness in your life without an expectation of constancy or continuity. I recognize the value and validity of those dynamics as well, and the ones in my life are very important to me.  I just don’t count the years in the same way I would in a partnership with a secure state of constancy.

My thoughts this morning converged on this idea of counting the years and on how we as a society measure the success of a relationship by the longevity of it.  This train of thought really began yesterday when I was spending time in the company of dear friends, and they were working on character creation for a D&D campaign using my old 3.5 books.  One of them handed me a paper they had found from one of those books, and I saw the handwriting and realized it belonged to Cat, a prior partner.  I was with Cat for only about two years, we didn’t celebrate anniversaries that I recall, so I’m not actually sure exactly how long the relationship lasted.  I was a garbage fire of a partner, I was just descending into alcoholism, we were dabbling into kink to an extent neither of us was ready for, and I have adult onset bi-polar which decided to make it’s home in my brain right around the time we were starting to get close.  A lot of factors converged and I can say looking back that I was an abusive toxic mess, but we had a whirlwind romance where for a lot of the time we were hopelessly and completely devoted to each other, the center of each others worlds.  That relationship imploded, as toxic relationships often do, and I have never mourned the loss of a partnership as much as I have with Cat. In fact I still do, I miss him every moment of every day, which is something I cannot say of any other partnerships that ended.

It is seven years later. My relationship with my ex-fiance, which began before I met Cat and didn’t end until later, that lasted six years, has now been over for a few years.  I was in another intense dynamic that lasted somewhere in the range of three or four years, and have another partner who I am still with and we will be celebrating six years this year.  And there’s Kelev, who I have grown closer to than I ever imagined I could, who I met while I was still with Cat, and who actually was involved with us both during that brief time of overlap.  If I just looked at it from the perspective of my longest lasting relationship, the dynamic I have with Kelev is both the longest running, and the most impactful.  If I broaden the view though, the relationship that effected me the most in my entire life, second to my dynamic with Kelev, was my short lived furious romance with Cat, that went down in flames.  The relationship wasn’t successful by the measure of longevity, nor by many other measures, since to be blunt, we fucked each other up real good.  If we are measuring by impact and growth though, that was the second most successful relationship of my life.

I have never stopped learning and growing as a person from looking back, seeing all my mistakes, seeing the beautiful passionate parts in between, and recognizing the worst of me that came out in that.  My sobriety is because of Kelev and Cat, Kelev for his constant support and encouragement, and Cat for being with me at the very beginning and showing me what I could lose when I let alcohol control me.  That horrible toxic relationship, the one that most broke me when I lost it, I count it as one of the most successful because I measure success through what I learned and who I became.  And seeing his handwriting again, all the memories coming back so vividly, reminded me of how much who I am and how I grow every day can be traced back to one of my shortest and most chaotic relationships.  He will be a part of me that I carry with me every day, through the intensity he made me feel that has not yet been matched, and through the growth he inspired and continues to inspire even years after we ended.  That relationship was my biggest failure personally, in how I behaved and who I became in it.  But it is also one of the greatest successes of my life in all it taught me going forward and how much the memory of him continues to spur positive change in my life every day.  You can never truly measure the exact impact of a relationship, but if you do, don’t look to longevity to do so, look at who you were at the start, who you were at the finish, who you are now from the effects of it, and who you continue to become because of it all.

Do you see relationships through the lens of what you’ll gain or what you’ll give up?  

Do you see relationships through the lens of what you’ll gain or what you’ll give up?

I think generally when people are looking for relationships, they are looking to add something to their life.  Loneliness, a desire for affection or touch, a want for someone to confide in or grow with, all our needs for human connection are a motivating factor in seeking relationships.  We look for what someone can bring into our lives, how our life can unfurl with them and what can be mutually shared and enjoyed together.  Especially in monogamous dynamics, people often are looking to follow the relationship escalator. The relationship escalator is where you meet and make contact, get to know someone, engage in romantic gestures, begin to define a commitment, and follow the progression of moving in, then usually pursuing marriage, then children or pets, and a happily ever after of further intertwinement.  It is centered around taking steps higher and higher, gaining more safety and stability from the relationship with every step.

In polyamorous relationships, especially for people newly opening up to polyamory, people are sometimes trying to fill in areas of their relationships where they feel they are lacking, with a new person. I’ve noticed often, especially in newly polya folks, that a person may be looking to supplement a need for more sex or affection or someone they can relate to and confide in, in certain ways, with a new person. In fact this is often a driving factor in infidelity in monogamous dynamics as well.  This is not the only reason, or even the main reason, that people pursue polyamory though.  I feel it is safe to say that most people who pursue polyamory in the long run do so because they cannot imagine limiting romantic love and connection to one individual, not just because of wanting to fill their own need holes with puzzle piece people.  The point I am making though, is I think we do often view new relationships from the lens of what we will gain in pursuing them, whether it is meeting a need or want, or just expanding the love we feel to include a new person and sharing new life experiences with them.

I have noticed that I do something different, that I have over the last 5-10 years or so begun viewing relationships through the lens of what I will give up.  When getting involved with someone new, one of my first courses of actions is to strongly define my boundaries.  “Do not expect me to ever share a room with you.  Understand I may at times be willing to share my bed, but it will be on my terms and not something you can expect nightly or regularly.” I am almost defensive in the extent to which I put my boundaries forward, as though expecting them to be violated without reason.  I do have a reason though, they are hard won boundaries.  I spent years not only letting others bulldoze over them, but repressing them myself and indulging co-dependency rather then independence.  Independence was and still is the hardest skill I’ve ever had to cultivate withing myself.  In fact, it was one of my partners pushing me into it, modeling it for me, and making it clear at times that if I continued to be co-dependent with him that I would lose him altogether, that started me down that path to begin with.  It was hard to take the independence that I found in that dynamic and apply it to my others, not to just use people as puzzle pieces to fit in my co-dependency hole.  After fighting tooth and nail to become a more resilient and independent person, to become comfortable with aloneness, and as I continue down that path, new relationships are frightening.  When I begin to develop a closeness with someone I have to wonder, what am I going to give up to this person?  What parts of myself am I going to lose and what boundaries will I let them walk over?  What will I have to compromise in my other relationships? Will I lose the trips to the supermarket with the partner who I can relax with more than anyone, who makes me laugh in our car rides alone, a laugh that never comes as freely with anyone else?  Will I lose the time to myself each morning, after I let the dogs out and before I have had my coffee, where my mind is able to assimilate all the coping mechanisms that make me functional through the day?  Will I lose the strength I feel flowing through me as I sprawl out in bed by myself at night and realize that I can finally sleep alone without being consumed by loneliness or a need for a body beside me?  What part of me does this partner want from me, what can I give them, without it being a loss for me?

I know that I am not alone in this.  In polyamorous dynamics it is clear that there is not enough time and energy for an unlimited amount of loves, there is always some kind of trade off in your own personal time or time with partners when you engage with someone new. When you have been co-dependent as well, freedom and independence are so hard won that you may always be vigilant that they are slipping away.  If you have dealt with abuse as I have, you may be constantly concerned that your boundaries will be trampled and wonder what you must compromise to earn someone’s love. I won’t claim to know which way is better, or if there is a better.  In all likelihood the answer is as usual, some kind of balance.  I know for me though, I do look at relationships through the lens of what I must give up, it is a struggle to allow someone into my life for that reason.

Relationship anarchy has helped some with that.  Being able to have dynamics that are fluid, that can take shape organically and do not need to follow the relationship escalator, and are formed by finding the common ground and desires of those involved, has helped negate some of my fear.  I have become confident in my autonomy and my respect of the autonomy of my partners as well, and more sure of my ability to maintain my boundaries.  To relate to people in a way with less labels and societal norms, and to enjoy the ways in which my life touches others without expectations, has allowed a little more comfort.  I am still guarded, I know this.  I anticipate expectations and obligations put on me, I warn and ready my loves for disappointment, and I still defensively insist on my boundaries with an often unneeded vehemence.  I hope more healing is to come, I am not sure if I will ever look at relationships from the completely what will I gain perspective I did in the very first ones I entered into, but maybe some day I will be able to worry less about what it will cost me every time I fall in love.

Engagements end, personal growth is endless

On December 10th 2011, seven years ago, I got engaged.  I had been with my partner Otter since November 27th 2007. We bought a house April 12th 2012, and split up in May of 2014. That is no longer the longest running relationship I’ve been in. I look back on it though and I can say it was probably one of the most, if not the very most, toxic relationship I’ve ever been in.  Not just for me, certainly for both of us, because we were both pretty terrible people for each other in different ways.  I have so many stories I could tell of ways in which we battled against each other, how I grasped for control, how he lied about everything from the minuscule to the great, how we both poisoned each other with anxiety and fear. It’s hard to zero in on one memory, one lesson, one moment of failure, or one moment of joy.

I don’t actually remember much joy in that relationship, except maybe in the earliest days.  Thinking back though, most of it was joy of experience and indulgence.  I remember late night runs with our friends to taco hell and stuffing our faces full of gooey cheesy goodness that we could suddenly have in abundance because as college students we were adults, and had no real adults to tell us that maybe trying to eat enough burritos to feed a small village all at once was a poor life choice.  I remember the first winter break, where I was kicked out of the house and spent it with him, how we ate out every day and it felt like a celebration. I felt so grown up being able to get in his car and go anywhere with him, instead of having to rely on where my feet or the metro or my parents would take me.  I remember on breaks how he would drive the hour down from his place to mine, and our hurried frenzied sex in the car in my parents drive way in the middle of the night before we would go in to their home and curl up in separate beds because they would never consider the idea of letting us sleep together under their roof.  I remember the first time we went to Disney, a vacation we could never have afforded on our own but that my parents gifted to us. It felt so grown up to be on vacation together, but most of my memories are of us getting drunk, the sex, and making pesto in the hotel room kitchen naked.  In fact all of my great memories with him revolve around food or sex in one way or another.  I’m sure there was more to the relationship then that, but I can’t remember any truly soul touching conversations or any times I felt like I was expanding and growing as a person.

I am still a hedonistic being in many ways.  I love to cook and make rich foods that are bursting with flavor. I love savoring new cuisines and experiencing the deep taste of cultural heritage that I know I can never truly understand, but get a glimpse of through the evolution of a food culture that’s progressed for centuries.  I love touch, both platonic and sexual, from the few people I am comfortable enough to let into my space.  I love kink, and walking the lines of pleasure and pain and sensation drawn out over a moment until it is endless and overwhelming.  There are so many physical pleasures in this world that add to the wonder of existence, and are gratifying to share with my partners and loves and friends.  But the most savory thing of all in my life right now is that these hedonistic pleasures are not the only isolated source of joy, and not my sole way of connecting to the beautiful people I share my heart with.

One of the milestones that occurred right after my relationship with Otter ending was my starting back in school.  It was necessity, I needed to pursue a career that I could both enjoy and that could support me, now that I would be taking over ownership of the house we had bought together and supporting myself on my own.  It marked an extremely important change though.  As I transitioned away from a relationship that was filled with, after all the lies and control and fights and neglect, a self indulgent seeking of pleasure in the material world, I began to focus again on higher learning and growth.  How could I have lost so many years to an alcohol filled haze and so many burrito filled nights of gooey cheese and comfort, but not much else?  I was someone who had prided myself on my intellect, my lust for knowledge, my fascination with the human mind and the human condition.  I was someone who had given all that up for the comfort of a warm body with an income, midnight trips to taco hell, and a pretty ring. When he finally left, after it was all over and I was left with a human shaped hole where I had stashed all my codependency and loneliness and straining for security, it was a massive relief.  I was empty and lost and it felt glorious.  I was not alone, I had various other partners who were glorious supportive and loving people, but none were that picket fence and two and a half children shaped normal facade of comfort and security.  And in my emptiness I saw the road to growth and learning again unfurling in front of me.  I slowly began to stretch out all the cramps in my mind, spent a few years filtering out the daze of alcohol with several bumps in that road, and began unfurling my brain and heart again to reach towards a sense of real fulfillment.

These days I still have some of the glorious people who stood by me through the ending of that relationship and my growth following it, in my life.  Some of them were there from before my engagement, and some from before I even ever got into that relationship.  There are many who have come along after as well.  What I can say of all of them is they are not normal, they are not picket fence and two and a half kid shaped humans, they are not people who bring me joy only through hurried sexual escapades in the back of a car and midnight trips to taco hell, they are not people who I try and control or people who lie to me and make me grasp out harder in fear.  They are people who encourage my personal growth, my love for knowledge, my dabbling into psychology and philosophy, and my desperate need for conversation and to be challenged.  These days I have learned to never sacrifice my progress and personal growth for comfort and hedonistic pleasures.  As much as I love my food and my sex and the comfort of stability and security, it is only valuable to me in a life also filled with challenges and mental exercises and a pursuit of knowledge and understanding.  I need to feed both my body and mind, and I need progress.  I am too much for a house and a marriage and a life with a sweet but normal partner to contain.  I can be endless as long as I can always grow, and I won’t ever lose that again.

My path to choosing radical honesty and onward

I was not an honest child.  I was actually known for elaborate but obvious lies in my childhood.  To this day my parents frequently remark about my ability to make up imaginative and unbelievable “stories” as a child, but stories are a nice word for lies.  Whether it was to get out of trouble, or just to see if I could, I often concocted ridiculously complex untruths, and while lying was definitely a thing my parents discouraged, I also got the feeling that my creativity was appreciated and that was positive reinforcement.

As I came into my early teens, I was the center of attention much of the time in my little group of misfits.  I continued to use my penchant for creative lies to elaborate upon stories to make them more exciting and interesting. I adapted others stories and experiences as my own frequently, or outright concocted completely fabricated tales.  They were well received, although partly so because they were often believed as truth.  I made myself a persona as an exciting risk-taking hilarious individual, and I was loved for it.

When I was sixteen I met Q, an individual who told me they valued honesty strongly, and I concurred.  Of course honesty was of extreme importance, it was integral really.  I saw myself as honest, because I was more true to myself then most of my peers in that I certainly flew my freak flag high.  As a goth kid who was out about my sexuality since I was 13 and bucked gender norms, I gave few fucks about what others thought of me, and I saw that as an aspect of honesty.  In a world when so many people hide who they are out of fear of judgement and rejection, I was honest in that sense.  But I still told stories that were exaggerated and filled with half truths.  I had begun to feel prickles of guilt when I did so, and had dispensed with the ones that were all out lies, but I was not what I would these days think of as an honest person.  Back then though, I considered myself honest because my lies were usually exaggerations, bending of the truth, little white lies, lies for the comfort of others, and so on.  I fell in love with Q, and made some silly teenage promises of being together forever and staying with them no matter what.  I think most people expect that forever for a teenager means maybe eight months if you’re lucky, but Q took me at my word, after all I had said that I valued honesty as much as they did and they had no reason not to trust me.  Looking back, I do think that it is a bit excessive to expect a sixteen year old to know what they want and to be self aware enough to be able to commit to a lifetime relationship.  In fact I believe these days that while forever is a pretty word, it should be never taken as an absolute commitment, because relationships can become toxic to one or both individuals, and anyone is free to walk away at any time regardless of prior commitments and regardless of the reason.  We were both young though, and I made a lot of promises I could not keep, and portrayed myself as a much more self aware and honest person then I was though. In many ways I was manipulative, and I knew it as well.  I was not malicious, but I was starving for love and belonging, and I wanted Q in particular to feed my insecurities and be singularly attached to me.  My issues with insecurity and co-dependence may have begun in that dynamic, and a lot of other factors played into that as well.  What it boils down to is while Q was older, and I saw them as a learned authority figure, they were new to relationships and socially isolated for much of life.  I was a social butterfly who’d been with quite a few people by then, I was well versed in manipulation and lying, and I had an overblown opinion of myself and my level of self awareness and honesty.

When I left them the approximate eight months later that a teenager’s forever lasts, I shattered something in them. I don’t remember those moments in the detail that they do, so much of that time in my life is a blur to me, but I remember thinking over and over in my mind that I had broken them.  I didn’t know you could break a person.  And I’ve learned many many things in revisiting those moments with them over the years, as they are still one of my dearest loves and friends thirteen years later, but at the time what impacted me the most was realizing they had actually believed me when I said I would be with them forever. That idea was incomprehensible to me, I had been left by many people who had said the same thing, and left a couple myself, and there was always this unspoken understanding that forever only means forever until it doesn’t.  I had a lot of anger towards them for other things that transpired in the relationship, I felt wholly uncomfortable with them and also uncomfortable with losing the grip of control I had on them that meant not being alone and slipping into that dark place I went when I wasn’t drowning my depression in social validation. So I tried to maintain a closeness as we battled against each other in a messy break up, and I got an up close and personal window into how much my lack of honesty had wounded someone.  It was something I was wholly unprepared to deal with.  My initial response to crippling guilt and horror was to shut down and take solace in my next partner, a give-no-fucks asshole who actually probably ended up having more of a heart then I did back then.  I rebelled against Q’s need for me to be a facade of a decent human and was a horrible combative combustion of fucks.  While it would be years before I came out the other side of our cycles of fights and reconciliations with them, my experience worked away at the landscape of my mind like a flash flood eroding a riverbank and I was left changed.  I knew I wanted to be a real honest person, not just someone who pretended to be brave and honest because they were a rebellious queer goth in a sea of “normals”.

I discovered a concept called radical honesty.  Actually I discovered a perversion of the concept.  The original idea was a self-improvement program created by Dr. Brad Blanton that espouses being blunt and direct even in the face of painful or taboo subjects.  I don’t remember exactly who explained it to me, but in a game of philosophical telephone where psychology and philosophy were learned from a myriad of original and unoriginal sources and discussed and passed along among my rag tag group of friends until the ideas only resembled the original content, I somehow stumbled upon this one. The concept as it was explained to me was blunt unequivocal honesty, saying whatever came to mind with absolutely no filter.  No lying to save someones feelings, no little white lies, no bending the truth, and no holding anything back at all.  No matter how brusque or inappropriate a thought that popped up in the meat space of your brain was, you voiced it. I figured that was pretty much the opposite of my attempts at honesty that involved exaggeration and tweaking of the truth and little white lies here and there to save face, so I would do that thing!  And that was how I made a few friends in college by bouncing up to them and telling them all about the fabulous first ever dildo I had bought earlier that day, because that was what was on my mind the very moment I first saw them and decided to talk to them!  Some of them are still my friends even today, and probably think I’m just as much of an oddball freak as they did in that moment.

It wasn’t all hilarity and awkwardness though, radical honesty was hard.  It was absolutely painful and terrifying and humiliating to be that extremely truthful and blunt.  Stripping away the protection of filtering your thoughts and laying yourself bare for the world is horrifying.  It was what I needed though.  I have always been a person with a driving need to push to extremes, and doing so allowed me to appreciate the gifts of honesty as well.  I thought people believed and trusted me before and I didn’t see how much of that was all a dishonest facade as well.  I needed to push myself to a level of inappropriate and completely filter-less honesty as a way of hitting the reset button and deconditioning myself to believe that my twisting and bending of the truth would be rewarded with admiration for my creativity or when believed, admiration for my daring escapades.  I also realized pretty quickly that while my thoughts were fairly strange and surprising to some, I was a much less interesting person then I expected I was, when I had to tell the truth about myself and my adventures all the time.

I kept to the radical honesty for a short time, I don’t remember exactly how long, but it was a matter of months, maybe up to a year.  Once it had served its purpose in making lying seem so alien and abhorrent to me that I never wanted to go back to how I was, which wasn’t a far reach after seeing the devastation I had wreaked on Q, I transitioned to a form of honesty that was still blunt and often vulnerable and forthcoming, and definitely allowed for no deceit, but did allow for something of a filter at least.  A situational awareness for what was appropriate and what wasn’t, like not telling a church group of grandmothers about the kinky sex you had that weekend (no that is not something I did, but more because I don’t know any church groups of grandmothers, had I encountered any during my radical honesty phase and been thinking about my sex life at the time I would have). There’s also something important to be said for respecting consent and what other’s are willing to hear, but consent was something I learned more in depth at a later period.

I’ve transformed my life completely on many occasions, but this was probably one of the first times I changed myself so completely.  I learned to value a depth of honesty that I still don’t see often in the world, a commitment to truth when it is hard and scary, when it hurts and when it scars, when it threatens to take away the things you love, when it can ruin your reputation or charisma and leave you standing alone.  I still ascribe to keeping to that level of honesty and integrity, though in a way that is also appropriate and allows for tact, though never deceit.  I am someone who may now say “I do not want to share that”, but I won’t make up a lie to cover anything up.  I also found that I became a radically more adventurous person, one who consumes any new life experience with a sense of abandon.  When you can’t exaggerate or embellish or create stories about yourself, you have to actually live a more exciting life if you want to stay interesting.  And the depth of trust people give me when I’ve proved I truly am worthy of it is one of the things I treasure most in the world, made all the more precious by the road I’ve walked to earn it.

I would not recommend radical honesty, especially the perversion of it I endeavored to try, to everyone.  I would recommend a truer honesty then most every attempt.  The world opens up to you in a million glorious ways when you face it with truth and vulnerability.  When every part of your fucked up edgy self is authentic, all your adventures actually lived, and all your emotions self aware and from the hard, this life is an intense and wondrous thing and connections with others are profound.  So don’t take the whole damn filter off and trash it, but do fold it up a bit and let yourself out into the world, and do learn to trash any deceit or bending the truth that you’ve held on to.  The world really is more glorious when lived authentically and you will leave less broken people behind you and find more appreciative loving ones ahead to welcome you and your truth.