Tag: emotional abuse

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.

 

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

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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.

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.

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.

Things left unsaid

I’ve always found it interesting how incredibly different two people can experience, describe, and remember the same situation.  Our experiences are very much rooted in our own perception, formed of our own beliefs, emotions, and all our other experiences that led up to that point.  Our judgments of others are much the same way, they reflect as much on us as they do on the person we are making them of.

I was thinking about then when I was contemplating one of the relationships I had over the last decade.  It swam it’s way up into my mind initially because I was thinking about one of my current partners, and how while we have been together for less than a year and the dynamic is a long distance one, how intense it is.  And while I try not to compare partners, my brain related it back to Kayla* and how it was odd that while that dynamic lasted a bit over a year, it was one that really had a quite negligible impact on my life at all in comparison.  I can’t say for sure, but I feel like it was a much larger part of her life then it ever was mine.  Which got me thinking about how different our perceptions of a situation or experience can be.

If you asked Kayla, she would likely say our dynamic ended because she couldn’t handle polyamory. I’ve certainly heard her say many times since we broke up, that she found out through dating me that being in a polyamorous relationship was not something she could do. I don’t mean to invalidate her experiences with my own thoughts, but to be quite frank, I disagree.  I don’t know that she could be happy in a polya dynamic, I’m fairly confident she wouldn’t be able to handle the kind of relationship anarchist way of relating that I have fully embraced now, but I don’t think that polyamory is why we broke up, even if she does.

Before Kayla and I started dating, we had known each other for years.  We ran in some intersecting social circles, and there was some low key flirting online from time to time, but I wouldn’t say I knew her well or that she had a real presence in my life.  Then she sent me a message asking about the possibility of experimenting with some kinks together.  My fiance and I had split a year or so before, which had opened up a lot more space on my dance card because that had been a very co-dependent relationship.  My lovefriend, who has been the central dynamic in my life since we got involved, is a person who often varies between attached and integrated, and extreme bouts of independence.  It was an independent time, so his presence in my life was still a constant, we cohabitated, shared finances, and were part of each others daily lives, but he needed more space and I was looking for other ways to spend my time so as not to bother him. So I was in a place where I wanted company, and I wasn’t quite emotionally healthy and had some holes in myself that I should have been filling with personal growth but was eager to shove a person into instead. Kayla had few experiences with relationships as a whole, and had told me that she’d never really been in love or in a committed relationship. I was also on a path of recovery from alcohol addiction at this time.  The year before I had gone from drinking a 6-24 beers daily for three or four years, to being sober six months. I then attempted to learn to drink in moderation, but had backslid some when things ended with my fiance and the drama that ensued after.  I was starting to get a hold on it again and making a lot of progress in moderating my drinking when that message from Kayla popped into my inbox.

I read her proposition, and I was craving some of the kinky interactions she was interested in, so I fired back a response and we agreed to meet up at a regular gathering of her friends and see if there was any chemistry between us.  The gathering we met at was one where alcohol consumption was not just regular, but a glorified thing, and drinking in excess was encouraged.  I felt a prickling discomfort that this was not a healthy place for me, but I pushed it aside, and soon became a regular at those weekly get togethers.  Kayla and I also quickly ended up in a relationship, the kink dynamic ended up not being as much of a central focus, and soon we were in some semblance of love. She warned me from the start that she was not sure how well she would handle polyamory, but during the heady rush of NRE she claimed to be coping very well with it.  She claimed that as long as she felt important and valued, she thought she could manage it with ease, and I agreed that the hard parts like jealousy were usually fueled by insecurity, and feeling appreciated and having all your needs met were a good remedy for that.

As the months went by, I realized that in getting into that relationship, I was compromising a lot of the personal growth I had been doing and sliding back into unhealthy habits.  I stopped exercising daily in favor of spending time with Kayla, she had offered to come with me on my walks but they weren’t the same when they were no longer a time I could start to become comfortable with moments alone with myself.  I drank a lot more on our weekend parties, and even when we stopped going to those as frequently, we just began drinking at my house instead.  She was an alcoholic too, and it was easy to rationalize that I was doing okay when my drinking in excess was normalized by hers.  We talked about wanting to improve, on working on our problems together, but I knew deep down that I really needed to work on my issues alone because a lot of them stemmed from a previous propensity for co-dependency.  Then there were the times where she would get so drunk she would black out, or close to it, and I saw her get into some vicious arguments with friends where words were screamed and things were thrown.  She was never violent to others, so I told myself it was okay, but the punching walls and yelling scared me the few times it happened, because it reminded me of the precursors to abuse I’d experienced before.  Then we got into a few fights when drunk, and she was no longer a reasonably good communicator, but someone who resorted to nasty insults and threats of break ups. I don’t know exactly at which moment I began to withdraw, but I know it began much earlier then I realized.

Kayla began to tell me she was struggling with jealousy and was questioning how well she could cope with being polyamorous. We talked about insecurity, we talked about asking for her needs to be met.  She began asking for more time with me, for doing specific things that mattered a lot to her.  I said I would make time for them and often I didn’t.  I then recognized myself doing that and began to say I could not commit to that, I could not promise to do those things, I would try, but that was the most I could give.  And looking back, I didn’t try very hard.  I was starting to sense that the relationship was very bad for me, and I was putting distance there and pushing her away in fits and bursts.  I would draw back in for a moment, compelled by love for her at times, but more often by her need for me, wanting to please, or wanting to fill that hole inside myself.  Then it would cycle back to my realizing what I was doing, that I needed to learn a self that wasn’t co-dependent, that it likely wasn’t healthy to be involved with an alcoholic while trying to fix my own addiction issues, and that I could not be comfortable with someone who tended towards irrational anger and was verbally abusive and violent towards objects in moments of extreme drunkeness. I wanted intimacy less and less, and soon I wanted to spend less and less time together as well. By the time she texted me one day and said that the relationship wasn’t working and maybe we should end it, I was relieved.  It was something I’d known for months and couldn’t figure out how to say.  That was the first time though, that someone else had initiated a break up and I hadn’t fought for the relationship. In the past, even when I knew a dynamic was unhealthy and had thought about ending it many times myself, someone else initiating a break up would trigger insecurities and a sense of failure in me, and I would fight tooth and nail to try and justify continuing it and working to mend things.  This time was different, and I was ready to let go because my desire for other growth was calling me to strongly and I knew I couldn’t focus on that with her in my life.

The first time I heard her say afterwards that she couldn’t be polyamorous, and she had realized that when being with me, that it was not something she could handle, I thought I knew what she meant.  She had seen me giving time and energy to others, especially my lovefriend, who had transitioned from an independent phase to a more attached one a few months in to my dynamic with Kayla.  She watched our closeness there and how I often wanted to be around him and had an extreme level of comfort with communication and touch with him, something I was having less and less with her every day.  She felt her needs go unmet, as I gave time and attention to other people while she was practically begging for it from me, and I brushed her off with so many laters that never became nows.  She did struggle with some issues that would have made polyamory difficult under many circumstances, and she definitely would have been happier in a monogomous dynamic regardless, but I made things a thousand times more difficult.  Especially when hearing from me that you deal with jealousy by recognizing how much you matter to someone regardless of their other relationships, and by asking for reassurance and for the things you need from your partner. Well she saw how little she mattered to me over time because I pushed her away more and more, and she asked for everything she wanted and needed and I brushed her off.  The worst thing I did though, was I never said any of this to her. The closest I came to it was telling her that the way she treated me when drunk and angry was completely unacceptable and I was not okay with emotional abuse, threats, or insults.  But I never let her know how much I withdrew and how early on it began, partly because of her actions, and partly because of my own needs which were incongruous with a relationship with her in the first place.

So the relationship ended, and I rarely think about it.  It was relevant to me mostly in relation to the little bit of growing I tried to do during it, and how it spurred a lot more afterwards because of the time I felt I lost.  I know it is cold, but I know I may have mattered a lot more in her life then she ever did in mine.  She may have been frightening when in an alcohol induced rage, but I was the one who disconnected and tried to use a person to fill a hole in myself that should have been handled before I ever engaged in another relationship at that time. There was so much dysfunction, and still, that is a blip in the radar for me.  I don’t know how much it mattered to her.  I don’t know if she could have handled being polyamorous with someone who gave her the time and energy she needed instead of pushing her away.  I suspect maybe she could have, if her first experience had been radically different and healthier, although maybe not given how unhealthy of a place she also seemed to be in at the time.  I do know that now I’m a very different person and the way I approach relationships has shifted entirely.  I also learned to moderate my drinking in the year after we broke up, finally gaining some understanding of how to engage without frequent excess, and then followed that with a year of complete sobriety so I could focus even more on the person growth I so desperately needed. I think the way I remember things and the way she does must be so radically different that it is almost as though we had two different relationships altogether.  That can happen with any two people because there always is some divergence in how people experience things due to who they are and their past leading up to that experience. In this case though, it was compounded tenfold by all the things I left unsaid.

 

 

*I do often change the names/gender/identifying characteristics of folks I write about. I don’t do this for all the people I mention, but at times it feels appropriate for privacy or distance from the situation.