Muchness and Light

A million lights are dancing, and you are a shooting star.

As I wrote about a few weeks, I have been seeing someone new. I won’t wax poetic here; it’s simply too early to exalt him to the status of Blog Fodder, in and of himself. I hadn’t necessarily intended to get into a relationship—though maybe it’s still too early to even call it that—while also trying to work on my own stuff, much of which was highlighted and exacerbated by the ending of my relationship with Rango. But the fact is he presented as an opportunity worth exploring while I was beginning the process of self-reintegration.

Whether coincidental or due to some meaning I have assigned (or even thanks to that fickle bitch Fate), there are things about him that remind me strongly of Bounder. He is not another alcoholic, though he may well be overcoming a history as a dismissive-avoidant. He is not Bounder, however, and it is unfair of me to make direct comparisons. They are two different men, with different histories and stories, but there are moments that are striking, to say the least.

Because of this thing with Finn (so named because he is my huckleberry) and because of the end with Rango and because I sometimes pass him driving on the road between our houses, Bounder has been on my mind a lot. A lot a lot. It makes sense that he would be, but it set me off on a path of re-analysis and overthinking (again). I think I’ve dissected that relationship for the millionth time over the last few weeks, still looking for where exactly I went wrong. Because his shit is his shit—I can’t control how he acts or reacts or fails to act—all I can do is try to figure out what I screwed up. He told me numerous times that it wasn’t me, and I generally believe that, but I always dissect to the point of vivisection, flaying myself to a bloody, psychoanalyzed mess.

I do remember getting a text from him, a couple of days after we’d met. He said he was glad we could take things nice and slow. Except we didn’t. We started intensely, quickly, and that’s exactly how it continued. Within two hours of that text, I was making out with him in the parking lot of his office, a quick drive-by on my way home.

And that is where I failed him. Hurricane Sassafras was coming, no matter what he did. I didn’t really hear him and slow down. It wasn’t terribly caring on my part, no matter how unintentional the push was.

Finn also said he wanted to go slowly, I have tried to honor that. I have tried to dial back my impulses to forge full-steam into his world. There is something there worth exploring, and I don’t want to do it all in hindsight.

Which brings me back to Bounder.

Working within the IFS model, I have become very mindful of my feelings. I don’t just mean my emotions. When I feel something—anger, grief, sadness, longing, affection, attraction, love—I take note of where in my body I am processing the emotion. There is usually a physical locus of that energy. Because my strongest emotions are often tied up with what a subpersonality is processing in a given moment, I feel them in different places, which is effectively where each of those subparts resides. Harley and Quinn and Stephie and each of the others sits in a specific spot and pulls on my center from her point of reference. When I feel a subpart whose name I don’t know (who maybe I didn’t even realize existed) pull at my center, the emotional and physical feelings are often coupled with anxiety.

Because there has been so much thought of Bounder over the last few days and weeks, my anxiety has been really high at times. It has often felt like a pull from the right of my stomach. Sometimes it has been so bad that I would get nauseated and irritable, desperate to make the pain stop.

“What is that she’s feeling?” my therapist asked. “She may just want you to acknowledge her feelings. Can you tell what she wants?”

“She wants relief,” I replied. “She is hurt and angry and confused. She doesn’t understand how anyone could have something so precious as that kind of love in their damn hand and just walk away. It makes no sense, and it’s infuriating.”

This, of course, is wholly indicative of my fear of emotional abandonment. While that’s rooted deeply in my childhood, the feelings of hurt and betrayal and confusion are never more profound than when I think of Bounder. While I’m still angry at Rango for how he handled the boys during our break-up, I have dealt with my feelings toward him, kept what I needed to keep and shed the rest. Same for DH and Rex and others whose names and memories don’t really matter or impact me all that much anymore.

I explained to my therapist that the feelings are seated in this very specific location, that they can be overwhelming at times. And when I am most overwhelmed by something, I tend to dive into it head first, hoping to reach the bottom quickly and resurface cleansed.

But that never seems to happen with him, and I am forever in a loop of self-flagellation.

“Well,” she said, “first of all, she needs to know that you are simply witnessing the trauma again, a memory of it; it’s not actually happening again. You’re not being traumatized again.”

Okay. Just a ghost. Not real. Not happening now.

“And,” she continued, “she doesn’t have to feel that anymore. You don’t have to feel that anymore. That’s a lot of burden to have been carrying around for so long. She can let it go. You can let it go. Let the elements have it—they can take it—they can take a lot more than that. But she doesn’t have to feel that anymore.”

Wait—WHAT?!?

Even I could tell that my facial expression shifted in that moment. I was stunned, utterly baffled by the idea that it was okay not to keep feeling those emotions over and over, effectively retraumatizing myself every time. I have dealt with it repeatedly, and there is no healthy in dragging the futility of it all around, night after night.

And it makes sense. I had stopped feeling similar things for others long ago, in a healthy timeframe and in healthy ways. Why is he so special that I should continue to carry that burden?

In part, I think, it’s because he wouldn’t. Part of what happens during the emotional abandonment is that I’m left to feel whatever with no support, and I’m the only one feeling it. Maybe the other person is feeling something, but it never seems to be anywhere close to what I’m feeling, especially when the other person is a dismissive-avoidant who is so well-versed in compartmentalizing emotions away to protect themselves.

I have often railed against feeling like I was carrying it for both of us, because that was sometimes the only way to prove that the thing had ever happened, with no acknowledgement of grief coming from the other person. I am sure Bounder felt it in the darkest of times, but I know that he never faced me to tell me he was sorry for hurting me. His not acknowledging me and the hurt he created, his ignoring of me when he damn well knew it was the worst possible way to hurt me, made me feel worthless, especially to him. But that flew in the face of his telling me he loved me, of his moments of showing me deep, incredible love, and I could never reconcile the conflict of extremes no matter how much I psychologized him and myself.

But to think, to realize, that I don’t have to do that was foundationally shifting. I could feel the anxiety and the tension to the right of my stomach abate immediately. There was a deep sense of relief. She’s there, and she’s a little antsy about what she’s supposed to do now. If her job was to hold all that baggage, what is she going to do now that still allows her to be of use to the Self?

I had a dream once while Bounder and I were dating, one of those lucid nap dreams. I was standing outside a tall, wide, stone tower, trying to figure out how to get inside. I could hear a knocking from the inside, and I needed to let whomever was in there out. As I looked more, I realized the tower was his face, the details of his mouth and eyes and brows built from each brick. I climbed some scaffolding and began to chip away at this one high, white stone. It was the speck of light in his left eye.

Months later, he told me that I’d been like this force knocking on his walls, over and over and over, until he eventually poked his head out enough to see what was in the light.

I let light back into his darkness, and somehow that wasn’t worth staying for. And it’s not that I wasn’t worth it; it’s that he didn’t see himself as worth me. So convinced that he would hurt me in the end, he made it happen, pushing me unaware into the dark pool so that I felt like I would drown before I could resurface.

But in the same way I did it for him, I must do it for myself. I get to be the disco ball for myself, to reflect light and shine it brilliantly into my own dark corners. Disorienting and distracting at first, yes, but eventually it becomes a beautiful swirl worthy of dancing.

It is odd, a little unsettling, to think of life without the possibility of him. I gave up the possibility of him as a romantic partner long ago. Our life goals are different, and he would never be able to consistently meet my needs. But he was always this driving force of emotion and thought, even when we weren’t together, sometimes in contact and sometimes not. Music, in particular, became a daunting prospect for me, because everything could remind me of him.

And that’s her job now, that’s what she is supposed to do, to dance. She is lightened of her load. And she gets to pick the music she wants to dance to. She’s not trapped by the years-long playlists of Bounder songs. She doesn’t have to be afraid of hearing one of them in the grocery store and bursting into tears. She doesn’t have to listen for him in every new song. She can move freely again, not weighed down by his burden or mine. She can find the path that she lost, can move toward light and laughter and love, because she deserves that.

This wasn’t her fault.

And if we pass him on the road again? I don’t know. I could feel something; I could not. I may well never see him again. I’m not going to dwell on what might happen. Now I have different roads to explore and a different Stephanie to discover.

And there is dancing to be done.

 

 

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You can be the outcast, or you can be the backlash of somebody's lack of love... or you can start speaking up.

NOTE: This post includes discussion of some pretty difficult subject matter, presented in an emotionally honest way. It may not be appropriate for all reading audiences.

At the heart of my myriad insecurities is a deep-seated fear of emotional abandonment. I am afraid that the people who profess to love me will stop caring, will decide that I am not worth their love and affection, and will dismiss me and my own emotions outright.

Physical abandonment is daunting enough, but it always seems to be symptomatic of a deeper emotional distance. DH left after our 19-year marriage crumbled, but that came only after he’d emotionally checked out of our relationship for years. I’d struggled to get Rango to engage in any emotionally significant way for more than a year before he told me he just wasn’t showing up for Max’s football game or my birthday. And when Bounder was most overwhelmed by the intensity of our relationship, he stood me up and distanced himself—at least until he decided he missed me too much to stay away—only to do it again and again.  

But the fear comes, plainly, from my childhood and adolescence.

I’ve written extensively about the sexual abuse I suffered as a child. There are at least six years during which I can remember being told, “Don’t tell anyone. You’ll be the one to get in trouble.” Years later, when I did finally tell—in the aftermath of a date rape at 16—I was left to deal with the physical and emotional impact on my own. Both the molestation and the rape were acknowledged very calmly for a few days, but there was no significant follow-up. I wasn’t sent to a counselor or therapist. I was sent, by myself, for my first pelvic exam to make sure I didn’t contract an STD.

My fear and my shame were dismissed, were boxed away so that someone else could handle what happened to me. My emotions were treated as if they were secondary and unimportant—or at least it seemed that way to me. With the exception of one close friend who literally held my hand through the process of telling, I never once felt that I was supported or cared for in those days and weeks.

I was scared and sick and confused and alone. When I most needed to be loved, the person who should have loved me most left me alone in my horror, pretending then and for most of the years since that none of it happened.

So what I learned from an early age, and relearned over and over and over, was that when someone loves you, then they leave you when your emotions are too much for them.

They leave you when you are too much for them.

Because they can’t handle what they’re feeling in response to what you’re feeling, it’s easier to pretend the feelings don’t matter or that there are no feelings at all. So while love is supposed to be this caring, beautiful, wonderful thing, for me it’s also tainted by hurt, twisted up with rejection and carelessness and neglect.

None of this is new. None of this is revelation.

What is new for me is the realization that the subpersonalities are afraid that I will emotionally abandon them. They are terrified that I will decide that they aren’t worth the trouble, that the help they try to provide is too much of a hassle for me to bother to listen to them. They are afraid of being ignored and dismissed. They are afraid that I will shut them all down, in turn becoming exactly what I fear most.

And my choices, my culpability, in all of my relationship failures make my trustworthiness questionable. My complicity in DH’s ignorance of me, which I would go on to rebel against in the most damaging of ways possible. My constantly shifting boundaries, allowing Rango to pull further and further away while I accepted the blame for his distance. And my tortured love for Bounder, whose kiss could make time stand still and the seas turn to sand—who I will still seek out when I feel utterly lost and alone, even though I know he will almost certainly let me down. The multitude of others, who said I mattered but then walked away with barely a glance over their shoulders.

Besides, I was the one who was making out with that guy the night of the rape. I was the one whose tiny body reacted with sexual arousal when touched inappropriately. While that is a totally normal physiological response, the behavior that wasn’t normal became utterly normalized. I knew things at an age when I should’ve been happily playing with my baby dolls and getting hugs goodnight instead of confusion and lies to deflect someone else’s blame.

They won’t love me anymore if I don’t do this thing that feels weird and wrong, being done to me by someone who says they love me.

Hurt was normalized. Secrets and shame were normalized. Pretending like nothing happened, like it didn’t matter, was normalized.

So if I have culpability or complicity in those hurts, who the hell am I to be trusted? How can my internal family trust me to make healthy loving decisions for them when I can’t even seem to make them for myself? How can I be trusted to do the right thing for any of us?

The difference in me and those who’ve hurt me is that I don’t want to be distanced from my emotions or anyone else’s. I don’t want to be ignored or dismissed, and so I try like hell not to do the same to anyone else. To disregard those parts of myself, to act as if my own emotions just don’t exist or matter, inflicts unbearable hurt. Shutting down, being numb again, silencing those inner voices entirely is the last thing I ever want to do.

I have to show myself the love and care that I expect from anyone else.

Integration can only come about if I trust the parts not to hurt me and vice versa. I have to honor what each feels, acknowledge each emotion I am ultimately feeling, and accept that the emotion itself is not the trauma. The traumatic events are over and done; the feelings are ghosts whose chains rattle me in a million directions at once sometimes, making me shaky on my feet. Making me insecure.

I may be moving forward, but I’m not leaving them behind. These parts of me, trapped at different ages and stages of development—disintegrated—deserve the chance to mature. They deserve the opportunity to grown into the woman they would’ve become had shit not gone horribly wrong.

I deserve the same.

Part of that maturation is coming to terms with the fact that it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t allow those other people to hurt me. I didn’t encourage them to devalue me and to dehumanize me. I didn’t ask to be sexually assaulted. I didn’t ask for them not to love and care for me.

It wasn’t my fault.

IT WASN’T MY FAULT.

I am worth love, and I am worth care and concern. There is nothing about me that is so inherently ugly or unlovable to have warranted horrid, difficult abuse. I was a sweet, smart, precocious little girl with Moonpie eyes and one dimple. I should never have been a sexualized object. I didn’t deserve to be molested. I didn’t deserve to be raped. I didn’t deserve to be smacked around and degraded by an angry boyfriend. I didn't deserve to be used and abused and discarded.

I never deserved being the target of someone else’s self-loathing and guilt.

I was worth more than dismissal and ignorance because I didn’t meet someone else’s expectations or conform to their fucked-up, dysfunctional norms. I am worth more than an eyeroll-and-sigh in toleration.

All of those bits inside me have fought to protect me from hurt, from allowing anything in that might cause more damage, But the fracturing of my personality into smaller parts left vulnerable cracks. Rather than fill the spaces with gold, like Japanese kintsugi, I often used whatever I could find: leftover packing tape ripped from an old dusty box… someone else’s half-chewed gum… desperate hope coated in blood and sticky mess.

But I was never going to be able to close my own rifts with someone else’s effluvia.

It’s up to me to find the healing from deep inside me, to let those internal persona who so badly want and need to help do just that. If the end goal is a whole Stephanie, the parts that make her up have to have a role in filling those gaps.

So I’m letting them talk, and I’m listening. I’m hearing what each of them says they need, and I’m doing my best to honor those wishes. I’m giving each an opportunity to share their respective visions of wholeness and then choosing what works best for all of us. For me.

It is a process to pick up the broken pieces and put them back together. It took years for the breaks to happen, for the dust to settle enough for clean-up to begin. But it has.

And it’s up to me to do that work.

It’s up to me to show myself the love and care that I need, and that starts with sweeping away everyone else’s pain and destruction and refusing to force my bits to fit with theirs.

It’s up to me to trust that I can do this.  

 

 

I don't want to be tied to anyone's strings. I'm carefully trying to steer clear of those things.

I am a passionate person. I tend to throw myself fully into whatever I do, doing it loudly and brashly and intensely—though I am perfectly capable of tempering that passion when needed.

I’m also verbose. If you’ve read Muchness and Light over the last seven years, you know I rarely spin up any idea in less than 1,000 words. Text messages and emails are almost as wordy, even if they’re just to myself.

Even while I’ve been inactive in this forum, I have tended to continue to journal, whether in a Word doc or an email that sits forever in my Draft box or in a note on my phone. Bounder commented once that he was amazed at how much I could get out through a tiny phone keypad. Although initially interested in my writing, and in being the recipient of effusive love letters, Rango eventually told me to stop sending him walls of texts that he’d lost interest in reading.

Over the last few days, I looked back at many of those messages. What I saw was almost two years of trying to convince him to love me. That’s not to say he didn’t feel the affection. I’m certain that he did. But I wanted his actions to match his words, to behave in loving ways toward me (and the boys) as often as he told me he loved me. It wasn’t just that I wanted reciprocity of affection—I needed to feel loved to feel secure in our relationship.

What I also saw in those messages was a slow spiral into severe insecurity. I didn’t regularly and consistently feel love from him, and I questioned the distance he was putting between us. Like so many others I have known and loved, he compartmentalized his feelings into these tiny boxes that he used to build a wall between us. As it got harder and harder to get reassurance from him, sometimes to get response at all, I inferred a great deal to fill in the empty space. Eventually I adopted what I interpreted as his skewed perception of me as my own, and I became unbearably self-critical, lobbing ugly accusations of flaws and unlovability at myself.

Last night, as I was journaling again, I got myself type the words, “He wouldn’t have hurt me, if I hadn’t made him so angry.”

There was no physical abuse, ever. But for me, the systematic elimination of my passion was just as devastating. I reread months and months of my begging him to engage me, of telling him that I couldn’t take much more of his ignorance. I saw him blame me for being too much and causing him to withdraw.

His withdrawing would stop, the distance would shrink, if only I’d give him space and time to allow it to happen. Every time I changed my own behaviors and approaches to match what he led me to believe he wanted, he would move the finish line and leave me just as far away from him as I had been just weeks or days or hours before. Eventually I learned to stop having expectations of him, because expectations are just regrets waiting to happen. Eventually I learned to suppress my own desires and needs—until my passionate nature would erupt in anger at having felt ignored for far too long. My anger would, of course, drive him further away.

“Baby, why you make me wanna hit you?” Queen Frostine commented dryly.

While I have been effectively starved for intimacy, I am also incredibly fearful of it now. Certainly, it hasn’t even been a month since we broke up, and I’m not ready to meet anyone new. I’m still not quite ready to entertain the thought that it might one day happen. The idea of getting over someone by getting under someone else is repulsive to me right now. As I explained to a friend today, the thought of anyone touching me make me physically ill.

But I long for affection. I long to be touched carefully, to feel my own warmth reflected back from the skin of someone who chooses to share in intimate moments with me. I miss being seen, being regarded as an interesting woman. I miss being valued as a woman in any way.

At the same time, I don’t believe I am an interesting woman. If I were, surely Rango would’ve stayed interested. He told me time and again that he wouldn’t have been here if he didn’t want to be. But wouldn’t he have chosen to engage me, if he’d really wanted to? He did other things he wanted to do. So, if he didn’t choose me, there must be something wrong with me. And if there’s one thing wrong, then everything is wrong. If I have no value to him, then I must have no value to anyone else.

I understand the logical fallacy. I get that this thinking is maladaptive and self-defeating, if not self-destructive. If I ever expressed these thoughts to him, he would tell me I was wrong, that none of it was true, but he would never offer reassurance. He might say it’s not true, but he would continue to behave in the same ways that contributed to my having arrived at the conclusion that I am fat, ugly, stupid, worthless, etc. And so my insecurities systematically buried my own passion, compartmentalizing it away so that it was less likely to hurt me.

He told me a few times that he didn’t understand why I needed him, or anyone else, to contribute to my own satisfaction. In his mind, I should be able to be fully independent, especially emotionally. In the end, I believe he saw me as weak because I needed him.

But I believe that love is shared. I believe partners in healthy relationships care for one another. They do the things logistically and emotionally that support the other. They work to create and maintain intimacy that is meaningful to each and to the whole.

I believe love should be greater than the sum of its parts.

I want to believe that there are others who believe the same, who want to live and love passionately for their whole lives, not just for the initial stages of a relationship. I want to believe there are people who care about others more than they care about themselves. And I want to believe there is someone who could both allow me to care about them in such a way and do the same for me in return.

But I don’t. Not really. I want to. I want to still be the woman who had faith in love above all else. I want to still be a believer. I’m just not. Not because I don’t think it’s possible for me to be that woman, but because I have become so accustomed to being shown those beliefs were delusional that I don’t trust them anymore. I can’t. The possibility of hurt is far too great.

Even if I never again allow anyone close enough to hurt me, there is still the damage I have done to myself. There is still my own culpability in having allowed him to hurt me, to have given him the proximity and knowledge-as-weapon to be able to do it.

Maybe in the end it’s not just that I don’t trust others. I don’t trust myself. I adopted those skewed perceptions, and I’m no good to anyone until I can unravel that mess of barbed wire. But I am truly afraid I will weave into some kind of armor to keep others at a distance—including myself.

 

 

When your mama heard the way that you'd been talkin', I tried to tell you that all she'd wanna do is cry.

So it has been a rough couple of months. Honestly, I don’t even know the last time I checked in, the last time I wrote something that wasn’t schoolwork or workwork or some ranting, raving text or email that I hoped would perfectly and pointedly enunciate whatever the hell has been trying to claw its way out of me. Heart, brain, mind, soul… all a big confusing blob of Idon’tevenknowwhat right now.

Radiation was a downer, but I got through it. All of this activity with my thyroid has sent my hormones into overdrive. Concerns about my health have sent my head spinning, and three days in isolation, binge watching Game of Thrones, sure as heck didn’t help.

But I have, at times, been a raging bitch. It’s not that I am imagining things to get upset about; it has just been far too easy for me to explode about anything and then find myself curled into a sobbing ball of inconsolable self-recrimination.

In the middle of a tense discussion about it a couple of weeks ago, Rango told me that he doesn’t understand why I am so drawn to chaos.

“It’s like you need the tension.”

He doesn’t get it. He says he prefers to be in the middle, at even keel and as balanced as possible.

“I don’t trust extremes,” he continued. “I don’t like euphoria any more than I like chaos.”

But me? I thrive in chaos. Euphoria is my drug.

“I need the tension to know I’m alive,” I replied. “It’s the only way I know I’m not numb, and I don’t ever want to be numb to my life again.”

I challenged that I abhor the happy medium he espouses.  But he has a point: I am drawn to extremes.

Lately, though, there seem to have only been extremes of bad, of anger and disappointment and outrage, over the slightest things. I can blow a gasket if the towels aren’t folded right or if the boys didn’t clean the table.

Last night, I was adamant that I’ll be kicking Max out of the house when he’s 22, because he can’t hold down a job or finish school or take care of himself—all because the kitchen was a torn apart by a ravenous, irresponsible, 15-year-old boy.

For the last week, I’ve been hearing other people say things, often random things that aren’t directed at me, that seem like messages the cosmos intends for me to hear. There was a gathering of the Castration Committee at my house over the weekend, and all three of the present girls said something very specific about themselves that I also needed to take to heart.

Yesterday, I was driving to work, in a total funk, listening to my favorite podcast, Death, Sex & Money (with Anna Sale). The latest episode was an interview with author and Buzzfeed senior editor Katie Heaney. Anna had interviewed her a couple of years ago after she published Never Have I Ever, her memoir of then-lifelong singledom. Now dating and now openly gay, Heaney talked about what it was like to let go of much of her apprehension about dating when she realized she really might want to date women instead of men.

No, I didn’t need to get the message that I’m really a lesbian, no matter how often the Castration Committee and I plan to swear off men and just be together forever. There was actually a lot in her story and in her words that jumped through the car speakers toward me. (That happens a lot when I listen to Death, Sex & Money. That’s why it’s my favorite.)

Sale asked Heaney if there’s anything she feels like she needed to be taught in her new relationship, having never been in a relationship herself.

“Not really, no…. Not taught. I think that I… and I am still learning this… I have to learn how to not catastrophize every disagreement or every feeling that comes to me that isn’t a one-hundred-percent joyous one. You know, I always thought that I was above the sort of ‘white knight’ narrative and thinking that a relationship was going to improve my life. I don’t think I thought it was going to improve my life, but I thought that I had struggled so long to find it that once I did it would just be perfect or easy…. I was naïve about what it really means to spend that much time with someone and still be happy but still have days where you’re just like, ‘Ugh, I don’t feel good, I don’t feel good today, this is not my favorite thing that’s going on today,” and I think early on I would get very nervous about that, because I was putting a lot of pressure on both of us.”

Dude.

Is Katie Hearney living in my head?? (I’m sorry if you are, Katie. It’s a cacophonous place.)

Sale did the same thing I did, questioned whether or not “catastrophize” was a real word, or whether Hearney’s mom had coined it in reference to her daughter.

Turns out, it is a real word. It’s an irrational thought that something is much worse than it actually is. According to psychologist John M. Grohol, catastrophizing can take two forms. The first takes a current situation and turns it into catastrophe—a small mistake at work will result in your firing. The second form takes thoughts of future happenings and creates a reality around the anticipated catastrophe.

Guilty as charged, on both counts.

In the very beginning of my break-up with Bounder, when I saw the potential of so much going badly because of something he felt I had blown out of proportion, he called me on it.

“You’re always looking for the worst thing to happen, waiting for it to blow up, because you just know it’s going to. Things aren’t always that bad, Sass.”

Well, he was right and not, of course. So was I.

I am incredibly analytical by nature—I am a good Virgo, after all. And my job requires me to be hyper-analytical, looking not only at what is wrong, but also at what might be wrong, to anticipate a response and a rebuttal and a reply to the rebuttal, all with the end goal of being right. I am very good at my job, but the cacophony in my head is often just the buzz of this computation of possibility and plausibility in a way that is extreme, even for me.

So while I’m analyzing the minutiae of every relationship I have, often to my own detriment, I don’t know if I’ve ever been able to give this one with Rango (or any one) a fair and healthy shot. He noted that I am constantly scrutinizing everything, waiting for it to break down and fall apart.

And with another year of hormonal chaos ahead of me—so says my doctor—I don’t know if either of us has the energy to try to keep up with my thoughts.

My crazy train can be gloriously and devastatingly exhausting. I am always on the go, and the next year will be no exception. There is not time to slow down, between work and school and the kids. But somehow I have to find a way not to expect the worst, even though I have planned for it so carefully.

I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to just stop being me. And I am afraid of taking away the glorious if I abandon the devastation. I am afraid of being numb again.

I don’t have an answer. I have a recommendation for a book, The Mayo Clinic Guide to Stress-Free Living, and I have ordered a copy. I am not one to turn to self-help books, unless someone very special recommends the book. This time is no exception, and it feels like the cosmos wants me to read something.

So for now, I am waiting patiently for Amazon to deliver my copy. I will not expect it to get lost in the mail—I can always go to the book store for another one if that one never shows.

But I will try to take those thoughts when they come and let them be that, just thoughts. They are not action, they are not reality, unless I make them so.

 

You were the promise at dawn, and I was the morning after.

My head is a little haunted sometimes.

Because I horde the memories, because I keep an extraordinary amount of minutiae in there, and because I'm an intensely emotional girl, there is a constant swirl of emotion in me. In a given moment, I will drive along a certain street or hear a specific song, and it will dredge up a memory—Oh, I talked to Absolem from that parking lot or That song was playing when Bounder and I <did whatever>--and then I will re-evaluate the entire relationship. It may take hours or it may happen in an instant, but every emotion I ever felt about that person will come in waves of good and bad, roiling over each other and crashing against the shores of my heart in quick succession.

Hurricane Sassafras can be an utter bitch sometimes.

But none of those emotions are happening now. I'm not living the event that led to the original emotion. It's just an echo, a ghost.

"Ghosts can't hurt you," Rango has reminded me a hundred times. "They're powerless."

Theoretically, they have the power I allow them to have, though I don't really know how to make them feel less important. Some have just taken time to fade. There are dozens of faceless, nameless shifting shapes that are little more than a murmur in my periphery.

But then there are the others.

My therapist said to me once that our bodies have a memory of their own, that our memories play out on a deep, cellular level because our bodies were physically present for the events that occurred. As she explained it, this is why anniversaries of powerful and vividly-remembered events can bring on the same emotions that were felt originally.

Right now, at this time of year, I am in a cycle of dozens of anniversaries. For whatever reason, the period from mid-April to the beginning of August is peppered with anniversaries like a minefield of memories. They run the gamut from wonderful to confusing to downright heartbreaking—and sometimes all three at once.

My therapist also had me work on sitting with my emotions, on allowing them to fall in and around me and just be, without reacting or overreacting to them, naming them and being aware of what they were and where they came from. But with emotions constantly on this rollercoaster down Memory Lane, it's too easy for me to become stuck in place, sitting, paralyzed in my useless fear.

And I do know that the fear is pointless and counterproductive. In my head, I am fully aware that what I'm feeling is wrapping its cold hand around my heart because I let it. I know that the ghosts are vaporous re-imaginings of what I remember, vacillating around my perspective at the moment that I am reminded of them.

But what is it about the others that I can't quite seem to escape them fully?

Absolem was both witness and accomplice to the inner transformations that were the cause of so much outer revolution. There are days I think of something that I should tell him and then remember that we no longer have that relationship, that I can't just message him and tell him to call me when he gets a chance. While I miss that friendship, I do not miss the emotional craziness that sometimes ensued because of it. I don't miss those tears, but I do sometimes change the route I drive just to avoid passing my own ghost.

Bounder was... Bounder. He was the one who broke my heart and wouldn't give me the closure I asked for. There was an ending—and one that took far longer to play out than we were actually a couple—but it didn't come how I felt like it should've, and it never will. Because he lives close by, I sometimes pass him on the street. It's not a ghost with him so much as a poltergeist, make me nauseated and ill from a sucker punch to the gut.

There are still some songs I just. can't. bear. to hear.

And with DH, it seems like there should be more than with the others, but there's not. In fact, it happens far less often than it used to. Yes, I've had almost three years to put that damage behind me. Yes, I still have to deal with his shit in my basement.

But I can also see the very best of him every single day in our boys. I chose to have two children with him for a reason, and Max and Tricky remind me all the time of how that decision was the best one I ever made. Somehow I've been able to unpack and repack all of that emotional baggage and keep only what mattered, and it's very rare that those memories have the power to upend me.

So I've been a bit on edge for the last few days. I told the Castration Committee that I felt like I was about to crawl out of my own damn skin again. Last night, the first good spring storm came, thunder like the laughter of those specters. I sat on my porch swing, feeling the cold spray of torrential rain on the breeze like phantasmal fingers stroking along my neck. I let the emotions come and swing with me until I thought I would choke on my own breath.

What was I feeling? Why was I feeling it?

I couldn't name it. I couldn't exorcise it.

One of Rango's superpowers is to be able to replace those memories with his own, our own. He is a Ghostslayer Extraordinaire.

"What do you need me to do?" he asked.

"Nothing. Just hold me."

Is it that you miss them? One of them?

No.

Is there something you're not getting that you need?

Not at all.

It wasn't that I was missing anyone else. I hate to compare old loves—each relationship was special for its own reason—but Rango is undeniably so much more than any of the others. There is nothing any of them was or has that he doesn't offer to me willingly and completely.

"Sometimes I just... hurt," I whispered to Rango.

It just hurts.

And there it was. Just hurt. Not grief or anger or longing or sorrow or love. Just hurt that hasn't fully healed. It doesn't feel like it did when the wounds were fresh, but it still aches sometimes when I twist just right or move too quickly in an unexpected direction. Sometimes I just bump the old wound.

And somehow, giving that to Rango makes the hurt fade.

He kisses me and makes me better.

Today, the ghosts are mostly quiet. They're just kind of hanging out and busying themselves with other things, playing quietly off in the distance. I can feel their presence, see them out of the corner of my eye, but I'm doing my best to stay out of their line of sight.

Somewhere between them and me is him, Rango, who will stand guard for as long as I need.

I'm not so scared anymore.

 

I'm not here for your entertainment.

A couple of weeks ago, in the midst of my four-day, constantly-tearful breakdown of what established initial patterns in my relationships, I read Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—And Keep—Love by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller.  La Bruja had recommended this book weeks ago, and I finally got around to reading it. 

Holy shit.

When she first recommended it, I did a little quick research online and came to the conclusion that I have an anxious attachment style.  "Anxious people are often preoccupied with their relationships and tend to worry about their partner's ability to love them back."  I realized I mostly have dated and been in relationships with avoidants.  "Avoidant people equate intimacy with a loss of independence and constantly try to minimize closeness."

According to Levine and Heller, people with secure attachments—those who "feel comfortable with intimacy and are usually warm and loving"—make up about 50% of the population.  Anxious ones like me make up 20%, while avoidants make up 25%.  The remaining 5% of the population is made up of anxious-avoidants, and I can certainly include a couple of my exes in that narrow margin. 

But when it comes to dating as an adult, the majority of secure people are in healthy relationships.  They're the ones you know who are still happily married after twenty years.  They're the ones I look to and wish I'd ever had a relationship like that. 

Secure men are generally not on the open market. 

There's a disproportionate number of avoidants in the dating pool.  This is part of the reason I am far more likely to encounter a Fragile Cat when I'm on the prowl myself. 

Anxious people are also more likely to be attracted to avoidants, as if something unconscious in us feels like we've found a missing piece of our puzzle.  Avoidants are usually reflective of a powerful, dysfunctional attachment in our earlier life, often from childhood.  Initially everything may seem really great, but then something happens and the avoidant backs away, which causes the anxious to move closer to close the gap, which causes the avoidant to back away even further.  Both partners are having their fucked-up emotional attachment needs met, but it's a pathological dance of getting close and backing away. 

In reading Attached, I was surprised (and thankful!) to learn I wasn't quite as screwed up as I'd thought.  Yes, I am anxious, though not nearly so off-the-chain as I could be.  (I'm less of an outlier than I normally am.)  Levine and Heller argue that there is a biological, evolutionary purpose and need for attachment.  Just as happens with parents and children, bonds are formed in the brain when we partner.  Synapses and neurotransmitters and a bunch of brain shit that I only understand as a layman come together to imprint that person on our brain as a matter of survival.  As inherently social creatures, especially ones who have sexual reproduction, we need other people. 

When an avoidant backs away from me, it activates that attachment system, and I've learned mostly unconsciously to do things and work in ways that will get a response from my partner, to deactivate that system.  (I'm talking phone calls and texts, not boiling bunnies, though I'd imagine this is exactly where and how stalking begins.)  When I don't get the response I need, it amps up my anxiety, so I step closer again and again until I'm either soothed or I get so worked up that love feels like a huge waste of my life.

Because of these patterns established throughout my life, emotional security is something I need in a different way than secure people.  That doesn't make it better or worse than anyone else—unless you're the avoidant on the polar opposite side of the need.  The avoidant's need for independence, their oft-refused acceptance of needing another person, is a defense mechanism and a way to fulfil their own established patterns. 

The avoidants' defensive self-perception that they are strong and independent is confirmed, as is the belief that others want to pull them into more closeness than they are comfortable with.  The anxious types find that their perception of wanting more intimacy than their partner can provide is confirmed, as is their anticipation of ultimately being let down by significant others.  So, in a way, each style is drawn to reenact a familiar script over and over again. 

My secure friends, and certainly my avoidant ones, have a very hard time understanding this.  They don't get why I can't always just suck it up and go on and get over someone, even when they've hurt me time and again.  But when that attachment system is activated and spinning out of emotional control, contact with that person can immediately soothe all of my anxieties, much in the same way an upset baby is soothed by the presence of its missing mother. 

Many individuals find it hard to follow through on their wish to break up, even after they've tried more than once to do it.  Anxious people may take a very long time to get over a bad attachment, and they don't get to decide how long it will take.  Only when every single cell in their body is completely convinced that there is no chance their partner will change or that they will ever reunite will they be able to deactivate and let go.

One of the things Levine and Heller stress is that emotional dependency is not bad.  It is, in fact, a natural part of a healthy relationship to make your partner's needs more important than your own and vice versa.  It's okay and normal and good to elevate someone else's needs above your own when you are healthily in love. 

But I have this history of addicted men.  Alcohol, drugs, sex—I've seen and dated and slept with them all.  I've written before about how I am historically and enabler.  So what about codependence?  Isn't becoming so enmeshed in another person that your boundaries are blurred just dysfunctional?  Doesn't dependency on a partner make you lacking or broken or just fucked-up in some way?

Not necessarily.  

Need and addiction are not the same thing.  Codependency exists, and it is especially relevant in the realm of addiction.  The addict uses their substance as a tool to maintain emotional distance.  They drink or get high or sleep with other people as a way to cope with their own damage, and that often means they are actively inserting something between themselves and their partners.  There are other biological factors that come into play with addiction, as well.  The times I have refused to leave because my partner needed me to take care of them—whether to pick up their drunkenly-abandoned car or make excuses to their boss or friends about why they weren't showing up or to clean up whatever mess they created while they were fucked up—that's where the dysfunction of codependence can actually be applicable. 

Just because you need someone, that doesn't mean that you are addicted to them.

One of the things Attached recommends I do is date a lot of people, to go out with several at once.  That way if an avoidant sneaks (bombards his way) into my circle, I am reassured by the fact that I have someone else over here who wants to go out with me.  It's no big deal that this one fucked up, because there's someone else who finds me attractive and wants to spend time with me.  Historically, I am not a multi-dater, but I'll see how it goes. 

So I put myself back on the market. 

Friday night, I had a date with a new guy.  I'll call him S, because I don't want to reveal his name and—as you'll see shortly—he's not worthy of a jellicle name.  We met nearby at a billiards bar.  We had a couple of slow drinks and talked, though we never got around to actually playing pool.  He was cute and smart and funny.  We sat on the patio of the bar talking about sociology and music and dating as adults.  We walked around for a while, still talking and laughing, and ducked into another bar for a last drink.  I even messaged the Castration Committee while I was peeing that it was going really well. 

With about thirty minutes left in my night, that first kiss was looming.  Okay, you'll get a kiss, and it sounds like there's a chance you'll get another date.  I was looking forward to the prospect of seeing him again and getting to know him better. 

Cut to the chase, and he turned into a handsy ass.  Now, I'm no prude.  While I've been mulling imposing a Three Date Rule for sex, I have never been one to live by such social proprieties.  That doesn't mean I've slept with everyone I've been out with, and certainly not always on a first date, but I am comfortable going quickly down that path if I feel the situation is conducive to such intimacy.  Yes, sometimes, it's just a one-nighter.  I had to be home in an hour; this was not going to be one of those nights. 

For the first time in a really long time, I felt like a 16-year-old piece of cheap meat.  I felt stupid and also insulted that I was being offered a quickie in the backseat of his car, parked down a dark side street.  Again, not a scenario I'm unfamiliar with given my history, but I am not that girl anymore.  I'm a grown-ass woman.  I am worth far more than what this man was clumsily and uncomfortably offering me. 

And after writing two weeks ago and talking with my therapist this week, it was like I was watching this from above, from outside my own body.  For a moment, it felt like Stephanie was sitting there with Quinn as this recently-nice man imposed himself on us.  I could feel myself now, knowing this was just insulting, but I could also feel Quinn sitting silent and petulant, wishing he would just take his rough hands and slobbering mouth off of her. 

Something in me clicked and shoved him away quickly.  I got out of the car and said I needed to go.  I walked back to my car, a block away.  I texted Pandy to let her know it had gone awry but that I was okay. 

This is where I will also interject that I called Bounder.

In the now-14 months since we met, dated, broke up, dated again, broke up again, slept together, slept together again, dated others, slept together again, et cetera, we have continued to have this weird connection.  One of us reached out to the other, usually via text, at just that right moment when the other seems to need us.  We still sometimes dream of each other at the same time, as we'll find out a day or two later. 

But in all of that time, with all of the men I've gone out with, Bounder always seems to know.  He has never failed to text me while I'm with someone new, sometimes at the most inappropriate moments that I don't see until after the fact.  He's never failed to reach within than four hours after I've been with a new guy.  Whether he smells my perfume on the wind or has a bug in my phone (no, he doesn't), he just knows.

It is unquestionably the dance of an Anxious and Anxious-Avoidant.

I'd even joked on Friday afternoon that I wasn't blowing off this first date with S just to go sleep with Bounder.  (It wouldn't have been the first time.)

I hadn't even left my house for the date when his text came.

Totally innocent response to something else from days before.  I was leaving for the date when I saw the message.  The man is uncanny, really. 

And I didn't shut down this thing with S because of Bounder.  He really doesn't have the power to cock-block my dates from a distance.  I wasn't caught up in the idea of him that night; I was completely engaged with S until it turned weird.  (Let me stress here that at no time with S did I feel unsafe or in any type of danger.  I was simply very, very uncomfortable.)

My voice shaking and low, I called Bounder to tell him thank you for having never made me feel like I owed him anything.  Honestly, I was thankful it was a late-night voicemail and that I didn't have to talk to him directly.  For all of his faults, for all of the times I have done this fucked-up pathological dance with the man I love more than any other ever but who is such a heartbreakingly-close-but-terrible fit for me, he never made me feel sexually worthless.  In fact, as I was working through some pretty ugly memories and trying to get past some things, he was incredibly, beautifully patient and supportive with me.  He failed me in a lot of ways, but he never, ever made me feel anything but beautiful and wanted for exactly who I was, not because I should or might be something else, not because there was an expectation.  And that, in and of itself, is its own kind of love. 

So I'm still learning how to step differently, how to dance to a different beat.  It's not like reading this book would suddenly make me not maladaptive.  But it did open my head, giving me some insight and tools to work toward the healthy relationship I likely never would've possessed, had I not started this process of intense self-analysis and re-discovery. 

As shaken as I was when I walked away from that uncomfortable moment, I know I am fully engaged in this process.  I'm not watching from afar, checking out emotionally to just let things happen to me.  Healthy or unhealthy choices are my choices, and they aren't dependent on what Cissie or Quinn might want, though their needs are sometimes still my needs.

I drove us all home and to bed.  Alone.

And as La Bruja commented on Facebook as we talked about this date, "The good things that I see from this: 1) material—duh; 2) nothing happened and you're fine; 3) when you meet the right man, and some hot guy starts flirting with you while you're in line at Starbucks, you won't wonder if you missed any fun experiences by not dating more. You'll know you've got a great thing going and that 97% of all the guys who flirt with you would not come close to measuring up."

 

You'll not see nothing like the mighty Quinn.

As I was turning 14, I made the decision to leave behind my schoolmates and the few friends I'd managed to make, opting to go to the smaller, alternative magnet high school.  I'd always been an outsider—the strange, poor girl who transferred into the upper-middle-class school where she could be guaranteed the gifted education her test scores demanded. 

In elementary school, I never had classmates who came to sleep over at my house.  My parents and I lived in a trailer two doors from my paternal grandparents, seven miles from the edges of the other school's district.  Occasionally I would be invited to a birthday party or sleepover at a classmate's house, but it always felt strange, like I was included because someone's mother made it that way. 

Junior high was better but only just a little.  I had a few close friends, and my happiest memories of that time almost all involve being at someone else's house.  My friend, Kelly, and her parents never failed to include me in their life, week after week of Saturday sleepovers and Sunday church and family dinners.  Kelly's home was warm and inviting, especially as I was surviving my own parents' divorce. 

I was abandoning the young girl persona of Cissie, but who was I becoming?  Adolescence is a terribly unsettling time, the shift from child to adult.  Confusion and disorientation are rampant, and I was especially susceptible to that.  The gifted high school, RLC, seemed like an opportunity to break entirely from Cissie and the painful memories of growing up different.  The school had its own unique history of being a safe haven for outcasts, a defiant eye-sore of a building in a suburban slum, and the students and teachers were unlike anything I'd experienced growing up in the White Flight safety of mid-80s Bluff Park, Alabama. 

RLC was the place that I became not just Stephanie, but Stephanie Quinn.

 

Quinn - Age 15 or 16

 

 

For a while in the 1980s, monogramed sweaters were all the rage.  I can remember desperately wanting a crewneck one in turquoise, my SKQ initials elaborately adorning the wool blend. 

"They don't do a Q," my mother explained.

I scanned the Sears catalog, looking at the choices of color and style, wistful for the tightly-woven threads that sheened the flourishing embellishment of "Diane Elizabeth Jones" or "Roger Adam Smith".  Q and X and Z just weren't options, so I never had a monogrammed anything. 

By the time I graduated high school in 1990, I had been the only Q-named student ever to attend RLC. 

I was not like other girls.

Looking back, I realize that my habit and joy of finding jellicle names started in my own childhood but certainly continued in my teens.  Budgie and Tomato Butt know who they are, and Tomato Butt began to call me "The Mighty Quinn". 

Who was Quinn?  She was different, even by the strange standards of the socially awkward, creative group she lived and thrived in.  She was tall and big and loud and awkward.  She was a slacker who found it easier to not do something that was hard, because dropping from the lower branches meant a faster, softer landing than crashing from the top of the tree. 

Where Cissie had tried her best to be a good girl, Quinn plainly said, "Fuck that!" and began to demand that life be on her terms.  If anyone expected anything of her, she would go out of her way to do the opposite.  She was openly defiant and disagreeable and rebellious.  She was sneaky and manipulative and mostly learned how not to get caught. 

Because Cissie hadn't gotten the attention and care that she so craved even when she was a good girl, Quinn learned that a gut-wrenching, lung-wailing tantrum could bring about attention.  Bad attention was better than no attention, so she worked with what came easy to her. 

Early in my freshman year, I met a guy at school.  He was a senior.  He never had a jellicle name, though I'll call him Jack for ease of use.  Jack and I were friends immediately.  We spent long hours on the telephone almost every night, talking about everything and nothing.  He would play his guitar in the background while we talked or watched TV or while I did my homework.  When I would argue with my mom, he would talk me down.  When DH and I broke up in that stupid high school way, Jack spent weeks and months letting me talk through it all.  Sometimes I would hear about the girl he'd gone out with over the weekend. 

We hung out some at school, though far less than seems likely given the nature of our relationship.  We kind of made out once, on the third floor hall during our shared free period.  There was no kiss, but my French teacher stopped to talk to us while we snuggled against the painted cinderblock wall near the stairs.  She had no idea that my baggy sweatshirt was hiding his hands on my boobs. 

And Jack and I never failed to tell each other that we loved each other.  I can remember the first time we did, on the telephone while he was at his house and I was at Karolina's.  It was just sort of said after a strange, rough night at the mall, and we continued that tradition for the length of our relationship. 

Jack was also the first person I ever told about my molestation.  He was the first safe place I'd ever known, and then he graduated and went to college.  I have the strange memory of Jack calling me from college moments after my molester tried to grope me for the last time.  I cried, hysterical and broken, explaining that I'd just told the man never to touch me again or I would kill him.  Jack listened patiently and soothed me through it.

When he first left, I missed him but was okay.  We would keep in touch through letters and then the occasional phone call.  (Long distance was expensive in those days.)  Eventually—and some of this is totally skewed by hindsight—I didn't fully understand that I missed him and why I missed him.  I became petulant and argumentative.  There was a nasty exchange of harsh, sometimes vitriolic letters, and then our friendship was dead. 

Eventually I started dating Damien.  The two of them had actually known each other in high school but hadn't had contact in several years.  Damien was loud and gregarious and pushy and funny and strangely charming.  He would call me, while he was dating another friend of mine, and talk for hours, about everything and nothing.  He would play his guitar in the background while we talked and watched TV or while I did my homework. 

Jack warned me not to get involved with Damien, months after our own relationship had passed the point of disintegration.  I specifically chose to date Damien because Jack had told me not to.

Damien goes on to be a tempestuous, on-again/off-again four years of utter Hell.  He was verbally and emotionally and physically abusive.  He was the catalyst for a couple of half-hearted suicide attempts.  He was the intentional, malicious cause of some serious self-harm.   

DH returns to my life.  Twenty years later, I'm cycling through a series of bad relationships with unavailable men.  I'm intently examining my history, unearthing any clue as the what and how and why things went wrong, so that I can at least have the potential to move forward in a healthy, fulfilling relationship. 

This morning, it hit me: I am continually recreating this relationship with Jack. 

Quinn smacked me upside the skull with a derisive, "Duh!"

Hell, Damien and Bounder were even physically built like Jack, and Absolem's hands always reminded me of Jack's.  Interestingly, DH and Jack knew each other, as well, and there was never any love lost between the two of them.

Time and again, I am drawn to creative, smart, funny, unordinary, passionate men.  Men who love music (including a couple of musicians).  Men who can talk to me for hours and meet my need of quality conversation.  Men who don't always have a lot to do with me away from that venue.  Men who hide me and sometimes deny me and the impact I have on their hearts. 

I have never once had an initial exchange of I-love-yous face to face.  I've never had the experience of seeing the look on a man's face when he tells me that for the first time, of being able to look him in the eye when I say it as well.  It has always come over the phone.  Once, it was even in a text. 

For months, I have been angry as hell that, to the best of my knowledge, Bounder never told another living soul that he loved me.  Absolem certainly didn't.  Neither did Katniss. 

And so even Quinn became a secret.  She learned to trade men's secrets and deepest, darkest truths for their affection.  For their love.  For sex.  As long as it was quiet. 

The Mighty Quinn, who has the power to make the crazy better, to return the frazzled to restful normal.  Who knows better how to deal with cold and dark than Quinn the Eskimo?

During the final bench trial for my divorce, the judge asked if I wanted to keep my married name or go back to my maiden.  I knew from experience that it's much easier with schools and friends and the like, when a mother's last name matches her young children's.  I'd also fully established my writing persona as Stephanie Quinn Jackson. 

But I have gravitated over the last few months toward images of Qs.  Initially I saw them as magnifying glasses, as a tool for closer examination.  Then I began to associate them with questions, with my own inner searching.  Lately they've felt more like a reclamation of who I was before DH. 

Today, I see all of that as valid.  I also see her, the 17-year-old girl who wants to make sure I hear what she has to say, who wants to make sure her valiance wasn't in vain.  She wants to make sure I know Jack.

So, Quinn, you crazy nut, I hear you.  I love you, and I thank you for poking me hard enough to make me finally notice the puzzle piece that's been upside-down and sideways for 25 years.  Now take your self-satisfied smirk and go take a nap.  You deserve it. 

 

And I don't understand. You deserve so much more than this.

When I was a child and would misbehave, my mother would send me to my room, out of her line of sight, with the words, "I love you, but I don't like you very much right now."

I love you, but I don't like you.

I don't like you.

I love you, but....

I love you, because I have to.

I love you, because I am required to.

The more trouble I was in, the more of my name I would hear.  Just "Stephanie!" was a warning.  "Stephanie Karen!" meant I was treading on some pretty thin ice.  "Stephanie Karen Quinn!" meant there was likely a spanking in my immediate future. 

But when I was a good girl, when I was sweet and obedient and well-behaved, I was Cissie.

To this day, I'm not terribly clear on the origin of the nickname.  I know it was given to me by a close family friend.  It was not diminutive of my given name, nor was it reference to my being a sister; there was no sibling calling me Sissy, as is so common in the South.  (I was raised an only child, and my (step/instant/in-my-heart) brother came to live with my mom and stepdad when I was in college.)

I remember being called Cissie until junior high school, when I demanded that both family and classmates call me only Stephanie.  While it may have been sweet inside the family, it was hard to explain this other name that made no logical sense to anyone else.  Eventually I rebelled against this thing I didn't understand and established myself fully as Stephanie Quinn.  When I went to the alternative magnet high school, no one knew Cissie had ever existed. 

Cissie was blond and blue-eyed.  (Stephanie has green eyes.)  She was smart and shy, though she could flourish as a chatterbox when she was comfortable.  For Cissie, it was important to be what Mama and Daddy and everyone else expected her to be.  If she wasn't, she was punished. 

Cissie - Age 3 or 4

But sometimes, no matter what Cissie did, she was just not enough.  She was tall but uninterested in basketball or sports of any kind.  She was smart but sometimes didn't want to do the tedious, necessary classwork.  Sometimes she tried to do it her own way, to challenge and entertain herself, but she would be chastised for doing it wrong, for not doing it how others wanted or expected it to be done. 

Cissie was also scared a lot.  Daddy had a sharp temper and would yell loudly at the least provocation.  Sometimes he would rear his hand back in anger, and sometimes it made contact.  Mama would nod and "Uh-huh" while Cissie talked, but she didn't always seem to hear those little girl words, especially if they weren't the words Mama wanted to hear.  And sometimes Mama would lash out in momentary anger and pop her little arm with the hard plastic hairbrush.  The oval red spot on the back of her arm might sting for hours, but it never felt as harsh as the pressing lump in her throat, the one she refused to talk or cry over. 

Cissie learned to spend time on her own, to entertain herself with imaginary friends and wishes for things that just never seemed to come true.  Cissie learned to bite the inside of her cheeks in just the right way that both kept her quiet and betrayed none of the anger she was harboring inside her little sweetheart mouth.  She had repetitious nightmares of witches and of vampires who lived in the back of her closet.

Cissie was also the little girl who was molested by a man who said he loved her, by a man who told her that if she didn't go along with it or if she spoke about it that she would be in trouble. 

It's no wonder that I didn't want to be Cissie. 

Stephanie - Age 14

 

But lately that little girl has been trying to tell me something. 

After another Fragile Cat skittered away, I was in a text conversation with Bounder (which is a whole different blog post's worth of fuckedupedness):

I'm tired of the hurt, you know? I'm tired of hiding in plain sight.  I don't want to be afraid of the shadows, scared of what seems to be there but isn't.  I feel again like my heart if wasting away.  I can't take another one who stays for days or weeks, with all of his fine words and implications.  I'm better with the balance, and I can't put these lessons into play without another person on the other side of that equation.  I want that safe place.  It's what I miss most, and I'm afraid.

And for all of my crazy, for all of my batshit and intensity, I'm a really good girl.  A guy could do a hell of a lot worse than me.

Very true statement dear...

I feel like being me will never be good enough.  I can either be myself or be what someone else expects.

And that little girl in me started to cry. 

It didn't matter what I did sometimes.  It didn't seem to matter that I was smart or clever or funny, loving or imaginative or curious, as long as I was doing what was expected of me.  As soon as I defied expectations, "I love you, but...."

There is no caveat for love.

There should be no conditions on love.  No one should ever have to negotiate the basics of their personality or their soul to feel that they are loved.  If a man tells me now that he loves me but he wishes I were quieter, less impulsive, less brash, more submissive, daintier, more deferential, I shouldn't accept those things.  I wouldn't accept those things, except I have accepted those things because it is what I learned as a child. 

Be different for me to love you, because what you are now is too much, is not enough, is wrong, and I cannot care for this defiant creature that you are.

All Cissie wanted was to be told that she was good enough, that it didn't matter that she wasn't perfect, that she defied Mama and Daddy's ideals in ways that still made her special and beautiful and acceptable and likable and lovable.  She wanted to know that she was good enough, that she didn't have to keep fighting and trying, that it was okay to be less than perfect.  And she wanted to know that she was good enough, that they would be proud of her for who she was, not for the accomplishments and the grades and the good choices she made that were really never choices at all. 

So for that little girl, to that little girl, I say, "Cissie, it's okay.  You are a good girl.  You were always a good girl.  It's wonderful that you weren't perfect, and it's good that you made mistakes.  You watched and learned, and you helped get me to here and now.  I'm sorry you didn't feel safe and protected and loved like you should've.  You deserved that, not just because you were a little girl but because you brilliantly, spectacularly special, and you were you."

Tonight, I will let her cry all she wants, to let out what is hurting her heart still, and I will tell her as often as she needs to hear it that she was worthy of all of that love, even when she wasn't always shown that. 

Going forward, I will do my best to honor that, to remind her and remind myself that Stephanie is resilient and sensitive because of the bullets Cissie took, that I learned to rebel because of the deference she endured and the secrets she kept, that I deserve healthy love now just as much as she did then. 

We are both worth it. 

 

Blind faith, heartache, mind games, mistakes, my sweet fireball, my sweet rigmarole, I want it all.

I was watching something insipid on television a few nights ago.  (It's hard to remember which stupid thing I was clearing off the DVR between sessions of homework.)  But I remember watching these characters on a couple of shows, walking through their lives and hoping to fall in love.  They'd meet their currently-ideal love interest in some less-than-ideal situation and visibly fight the thought that just maybe that was the person for them.  They were all looking for magic but refused to admit when they found it. 

I want magic. 

I spent a glorious Saturday evening with Pandy (née Hot Pocket) this past weekend.  After hours of dancing and laughing and eating and a little too much whipped cream, we settled into the quiet while our babies slept down the hall.  Eventually the talk turned yet again to my love life, specifically about what I loved about each of the men who have impacted my life so dramatically.

"What do you want?" she asked.  "Not what qualities you want in a man—what things?  If you could make a wishlist, what would be on it?"

Pandy knows damn well I've written a couple of times about what I want—the affection, the attentiveness, the lack of addiction.  But I know Pandy, and this was her Practical Magic moment of daring me to put my wishlist out there where Fate might get ahold of it and take her chance at offering me exactly what I want.

I started to think about it in terms of these prior relationships—DH, Absolem, Bounder, Katniss, Rex—that had offered me something good in their way but had still not managed to be good enough.  Like thinking about what you want in your unborn child, I started to pick and choose from those men. 

From DH, I would want the care he could provide.  For all of his flaws, he was an exceptionally good, practical caregiver when I needed it.  Whether stopping at the grocery store while I was busy with a baby boy or carefully doling out medication and clean bandages after surgery, he took really good care of me.  Eventually I learned to care for myself, which was one of the many problems we were never able to resolve, but I would want that active, tangible concern.  (Check for both Bounder and Katniss for doing this, as well, in their own ways and times.)

From Absolem, I would want the clarity of vision.  He could peek readily through my façade and see me.  It was impossible to hide my truths from him, and he never failed to tell me exactly what he saw—even if I didn't like it.  Bounder was just as adept, though he often danced around sharing his thoughts.  I would also want the fearlessness, the adventure for life, that I have only ever found in Absolem.

From Bounder, there is so much.  He set the bar so high in so many ways, though he often let it clatter to the ground—sometimes abrading me with those collapsing expectations.  The depth of emotion, both his own and felt with me.  The strength and vulnerability that were intricately interdependent.  The mischievous, crinkling eyes every time he smiled when I told him I loved him.  The ease with which he could cry with me, for me, in front of me, and how he never, ever withheld my emotions even when they were more than he thought he could bear.  How he would patiently and without recrimination listen as I unleashed my crazy, circuitous head and heart, but how I never had to actually say what I was thinking because he always just knew.  And the kiss that could stop time and turn the seas to dust.  That kiss that may never be topped. 

From Katniss, the chivalry and the romance.  The single red rose the first time we met, and the choice of a perfect book for Christmas.  The stories he would weave for me.  The way he could calm me with a single word, dropped at the exact, magical moment when I needed it most.  The way he would watch me intently while I spoke, and the lullabies he would sing to me over the phone just before I fell asleep. 

From Rex, the largess.  Not just the physical size—though make no mistake that I loved the way his hugeness felt, wrapping me into a dainty package that didn't feel like it would break.  How his hands dwarfed mine.  But there was a largeness of character, of dynamic, that was simultaneously gentle and kind.  The way he could make me laugh at anything and everything, but also how he could shut down my humming brain and quiet my overthinking with a look.  In some ways he did outdo Bounder, and I was thankful to know the bars could be raised even further.  And I have never been so immediately comfortable with a man as I was with him. 

But my wishlist is missing the one trait that each of these men has in common: their ability to make me feel negligible.  The practical, magical one will be there, no matter what.  He will call me every day that he can, even if it's just to tell me he loves me and goodnight after a really long day.  He will text me random thoughts and pictures and be thrilled that I message him regular  love letters, equally romantic and raunchy.  He will lie with me in the floor and the firelight, letting me sing whatever song I feel that night, while he strokes my hair gently and whispers to me that I am beautiful. 

And he will be there in the middle of the night, when I wake cold and scared, afraid of what comes out of my dreams.  He will sleep comfortably, soundly next to me.  He will actively, happily love me, and he will fight Heaven and Hell to be with me.  He will do what no one has ever been willing to do for me before: he will value me, openly and honestly, and remind me every day that I am worth his fight. 

And in return, I will love him like no other.  Every fiber of my being, every moment of soul and joy and heartache, every laugh and every tear, every angry word and every whisper of adulation in the dark.  To fill in every crack, to give him strength to be vulnerable, safety to be dangerous, acceptance to be who he was meant to be.   

Maybe it's foolish to wish these things.  Maybe it's childish or naive to hope that I find what I want most, what I seek as doggedly as I have ever done anything. 

And maybe it's magic. 

I stand up, and I'm searching for the better part of me.

During the process of divorce, especially at the beginning, life becomes almost exclusively about your children.  Obviously for people who don't have kids or who have adult children, it's a different story, but I don't know what that's like.  Living through both my parents' divorce when I was 11, as well as the last couple of years, I only have intimate knowledge of what it's like from my perspective.

Like so many couples, DH and I had brutal, nasty arguments before the separation.  We tried our best to keep them away from the boys, though I know we weren't always successful.  While we did our best to keep the energy off of them, there's no way they didn't feel the tension.  Sometimes it boiled over and disrupted their lives, occasionally waking them or turning into a heated exchange in the middle of dinner. 

The night we told them that we were separating was the worst of my life.  In that moment, I remembered very clearly being the child huddled on the couch between my parents.  They were both sadly stoic, trying to explain clearly and concisely that they were divorcing, that our lives would change, but that we were still a family who would get through this together.  Watching the boys cry the night we told them, I knew exactly how their hearts were breaking and all of the questions they'd both ask me and keep quietly and painfully to themselves. 

At first, all of my energy went into keeping them calm and safe.  With very good reason, I was even more attentive and patient with them.  I tried to make every waking moment as quality as I could muster, while also giving them space to be able to breathe and think on their own or together, away from Mom. 

Eventually I had to start living my own, private life.  I had to begin to see what being a single mom and woman was like.  A big part of that, of course, has been dating. 

My parents were very good at this.  I was about the same age as Max, so four years older than Tricky, when my parents separated.  When they each started dating, they were careful to keep those new people away from me.  I can only remember meeting two men my mom went out with, one of whom is my stepdad of more than twenty-five years.  I met a few more women with my dad, though he has always said some were nothing more than friends.  He dated one woman for several years, and she actually lived with us for a good portion of their relationship.  Both he and I are still friends with her, even though they've been broken up far, far longer than they were together. 

When I started dating Bounder and saw the potential of something more important, having him meet the boys eventually became necessary.  It wasn't that I needed them to welcome their new daddy into their life; no one will ever replace their father, whom they love very, very much.  But if he and I were going to have a relationship, we would need to spend quality, physical time together.  And, no, I don't just mean sex.  (He never, ever spent the night at my house while the boys were home.) 

Dating and being in love would have to consist of more than constant texts and emails.  Regular phone calls couldn't replace regular hugs and kisses.  While quality time and conversation are of tantamount importance to me, I am bi-lingual (in The 5 Love Languages sense) for physical touch.  The small intimacies of handholding and kisses on the cheek are just as important to me as the loving whispers and soft laughs in my ear.  I need boisterous laughter, both in and out of the bedroom. 

Of all the men I've met and gone out with since I separated from DH, the boys have only met Bounder.  Initially, it was a ten-minute, "nice to meet you" moment one afternoon.  Eventually they were okay with his coming to visit me after they went to bed, then they were comfortable with dinners together and a movie after.  We would occasionally take them out and do something with them, together.  When he and I broke up, they were sad for me but also a little sad that they wouldn't get to see him.  I handled it well (at least in front of them).  They know that I still have occasional contact with him and ask me about him from time to time. 

It's hard enough to bring someone new into my life, but my life includes two boys.  They have to be a part of anything substantial.  Not only are they the most important people in my life, I am their primary caregiver.  They spend the majority of their time in my care.  With some potential changes on the horizon, I am likely to be responsible for them even more of the time.  If I try to wait to see someone I'm dating until a night when I don't have them, it could be weeks that we have to wait. 

Relationships can't function healthily like that. 

While it was best to make the boys the main focus initially, it does no one any good for them to be the only priority.  We live in such a child-centric time, but they have to learn that they really aren't the epicenter of anyone's world but their own.  They are of an age to begin to realize there's more to life than just them. 

Stephanie is more than Mommy.

Going back to school, working small jobs while I'm doing it, makes our life very busy.  I can no longer devote all of my time and energy to their schedules.  Our family calendar is sometimes a color-coded nightmare of homework and school events and appointments.

But taking the time to be me, content and comfortable in who I am and my abilities, makes me a better woman.  Being a complete woman, who is able to both express and receive love from more than just my children, makes me a better mother. 

And it's good for them to see that Mom can go on and have a happy, healthy, productive life.  They won't always been in the house with me, no matter how often they declare that they'll always live with me.  They will eventually move on to college and relationships and the lives that they build for themselves.  I will be here (figuratively or literally, I don't know yet), living and building my own future. 

When I am happy and healthy, living my life while incorporating them into it, I show them by example.  My goal is to raise healthy young men who can handle their own shit.  My hope is that they find partners who can do the same, in part because that is what their mother modeled for them.