Skellington

Sex, or something like it...

I've been consistently polyamorous in relationships for the last 25 years. I've been in kink relationships for the past 25 years. I've been consciously Genderqueer for the last five or so, but I've never been particularly Normal in terms of gender/sex identification. When I say that my relationships have been primarily Sapphic that might seem like I'm sticking myself in a female pigeon hole. I'm okay with that.

When I came out as Genderqueer I lost some lovers who decided that me putting a word to something I've always been made me no longer qualified to bed them. I don't much talk with those people any more. They remind me too much of the people who decided that I was no longer the same person once I got sober and they weren't going to spend time with me any more.

I suppose it's perfectly normal for me to worry that others will decide that I'm not Genderqueer enough to be acceptable.

I wonder why people make it so hard to be good enough for them. Is it because they fear that they're not good enough either and they have to double down on enforcing the rules or they won't be winning the game anymore?

When one of my old lovers (by which I mean someone I've been intimate with on and off for thirty years, and with whom I have most of my other lovers in common) started exploring gender some fifteen years ago, we had a lot of fun with it together. In the last two years she's pretty much settled in on her female identity and has also had that experience of falling out of other people's expectations.

Last night we got together in person in a place where we could be intimate for the first time in well over two years.

Previously we'd spoken about many many kinds of intimacy. We're both kinky as Q-Bert and enjoy discussing the dynamics, techniques, technology, theory, and practice of psychological, emotional, and physical intimate play. One time, recently, I said to her, “You know, I've never approached you intimately the way I would seduce and enjoy fucking with a fellow Sapphic. Would you be interested in trying that sometime?” She was all, “Yeah, okay. Sure. I'll try it.”

So, I did.

We had fun, and I was much more in charge of things than normal for our in person encounters. She seemed to enjoy it, even if she was a little bit confused.

Today, she messaged to apologize to me about last night.

I asked if she'd felt uncomfortable or scared. I asked if I'd pushed too hard or too far. I asked if she'd enjoyed herself. I asked if she wanted not to do that again.

No, she'd had a great time and wanted more like that, but she felt bad because she hadn't performed up to her expectations.

(Sometimes I wonder that in the complicated intimacy community if we don't get a little too dedicated to our roles and our performances.)

I've taught kink classes and discussed communication and care for ages, and it's amazing how I can still be surprised at how hard it can be to simply relax and let things happen. Maybe sometimes we micromanage and try to control the things that frighten us and when we enjoy them we can feel like we're failing somehow to control our enjoyment.

I wonder if that's why people sometimes dump folks who suddenly seem to exist outside of their expectations. I wonder if feeling like someone else has changed the variables without their permission is too much to process and things become too scary to risk messing up somehow.

It's not easy to get sober. It's not easy to tell the social conventions of gender and sex to go fuck themselves. It's not easy to choose personal authenticity and personal self-acceptance over the attention and support that comes with conforming to the ideas of others.

If those choices seem impossible, then someone who has made those choices might just seem more than a little terrifying. Threatening. Shaming. A constant reminder that different choices are possible.

Maybe some people dress up their defenses against that kind of fear as dedication to tradition and the sanctity of their known rules of society.

That may explain the mechanism of intolerance and hate, but it certainly doesn't excuse it. But if it does explain the mechanism, maybe those of us who can and choose to do so, can check our own thoughts and understandings of how society works so that we don't emulate that mechanism against ourselves and others.

I suspect that the most important step in that process is not refusing to shame others for not living up to our expectations, but refusing to shame ourselves. To choose, every time, to sit with our feelings of inadequacy, insecurity, and fear of rejection and make time to care tenderly for those parts of us that are feeling that way. Not shove it in a box. Not ignore it. Not pretend it's not there. Not scold it. Not encourage it, or built it up, or play narratives that reinforce it, either.

Care for it, as tenderly as we would a good friend with a head cold. We can know that these feelings will pass along and some good soup, some bad tv, and a couple dozen naps will help us live in this moment of discomfort and come through it without making it the center of our universe all the time forever. If we care for a physical cold, we can get better. If we don't care for the cold or pretend it's not there, we can get much worse. If we continue resting and eating like we're sick, we may not build our strength up again after.

So, having made this much stew out of the single oyster of one intimate encounter I don't think I can ever tease anybody else about overthinking or micromanaging their sex lives ever again. That's probably a really good thing for me to remember.

DADT and the plucky underdogs...

I did part of my growing up in the 80s, and Spouse is a few years older than me, so we remember the same things, but she remembers them with less naivete because she was a little older and had more friends than I did. When we talk about media from that era I'll frequently end up saying, “Why did they...” and she'll just me off with “Cocaine.” It's gotten to the point where we'll be encountering some cultural element that seems odd and I'll just ask, “Cocaine?” and she'll nod. That's how I know that whatever thing it is is a peculiar quirk of the period and was probably never actually taken seriously by anybody at the time, but it is seen as normal to the culture in retrospect. The kinds of things that time travelers always get subtly wrong when they travel to a period that they never lived in. “Hello, fellow youths! What is happenin'?!”

Still, a lot of the stories from that period made me feel good about myself because there were so many that were about groups of plucky underdogs and outcasts who bonded together and saved the day while making the squares look tepid.

I'd long considered this genre to be basically harmless and a fun way to poke at the establishment and show weirdos like me that we can be useful and productive members of society... like Rudolph.

Sadly, it wasn't until much later in my life that I learned how those very stories uphold the status quo of a society and reinforce commitment to the existing system. The plucky outcasts become the exceptions that prove the rule because even as outcasts, they work to save the society as a whole and expose the weaknesses embodied by the squares.

Like, they were never going to make a Police Academy movie where our lovable band of misfits work together to replace the present system with community systems of care and cooperation, only to make the present system look more accepting and essentially harmless. Ferris Bueller was never going to use his charisma and whimsy to provide material comfort for people, only to keep women and beta cucks in line and glamorize creative selfishness.

I had been out for about four years by the time I enlisted in the US Army in 1995. DADT (Don't Ask Don't Tell) meant that they couldn't ask if I was Queer and as long as I didn't tell anybody, they wouldn't kick me out. Okay, I thought, this is some plucky weirdo situation. I grok this.

And it was.

But I was not consciously aware that my self-subjugation was a form of system worship beyond my imagination. I was not aware that other people weren't living day to day in fear of the damage that rumors could do, and I didn't see how many other people weren't getting assaulted at work. The abuse, the rape, the constant threats... this is normal for the plucky weirdo. Right?

No, buddy. It's not normal. It's not okay. And it hurts a lot and does great harm.

But that's the slippery slope of the plucky weirdo outcast trope. One begins to accept a little abuse and things build up from there. In real life, there are no script writers to craft redemption for those who harm or comedic triumph for those who are harmed. It just hurts and it perpetuates the abuse that is inherent in the system.

When I went into that system knowing that I was not accepted as I am, I gave every single bully and twit a lever to use against me. I got by through liberal use of my rope-a-dope skills and by being smarter than most of the people around me. It was not fun. It was not healthy.

When every day is a struggle to survive, that is not a good lifestyle.

I want to see the version of Real Genius where the students manage to sabotage the military industrial complex and trick them into producing prefab hygiene units, or mosquito netting and shipping it where it will help people. While seeing the grifting jerk's house explode the way it does is emotionally satisfying, it remains an implicit act of approval of the weapon and the system that worked to bring that weapon into play.

(if you've never seen Real Genius, please do watch it. While it's super dated and rude, I still like it better than that tv show with the “geniuses” who live with the “normals” and hi-jinx ensue. The lack of a laugh track probably helps.)

The harmless and dated media of our youths may be dated, but it is not harmless. Until we challenge what we watched and consider it with a critical eye about what exactly we were being sold at the time, we cannot ferret out the habits of thought that were programmed into us. The words people used were not nearly so important as the relationships they were showing without explicit words. This is my example of how early programming set me up for a rough experience.

I know others have had worse experiences and others have had better experiences. It's not for me to tell their stories. I am a DADT era veteran, and the experience turned me 500% more queer and 300% more anarchist. Part of me is worried that younger people will look at the dated language and over sexism and racism of those 80s shows and dismiss them as “cocaine” products. I worry that they may never look deep enough to see that the poison isn't The Blue Oyster gag, but the idea that outcasts and weirdos are required to save stagnant systems and are only ever accepted while they are doing that and are far more expendable than those who conform.

Being an outcast is a superpower. I think we must consider very carefully how we use that superpower to reinforce the very systems that cast us out.

Symptoms and helplessness...

Sometimes the worst thing about mental illness is how others treat me, or how it's frustrating to try and do things that are hard for me, or how much it hurts to explain to people I love that I just can't do something for them or with them.

Most of the time the worst thing about my mental illness is my mental illness.

Like, I've done a large amount of work over the last decade to learn about how science says that humans work and identify my personal deviations and then develop skills to offset those deviations in terms of the behavior I need to survive and be as healthy as possible. When I've been introduced to a new mode of therapy, I've gotten the books written by the people who created it for other professionals to learn how it works. I've learned about the biological parts of my mind and the chemicals and medicines I'm working with to keep my life from going back off the rails completely.

CBT, DBT, IFS, CPT, ACT, almost any three letters you can put together, I've worked with them and have treated my medical professionals as though they are an elite team of researchers supporting me as I figure out how to run Earthship Skellington around the world without harming anybody.

All these skills and tools are great. I think that DBT should be part of everyone's basic primary education. My life right now is better than I ever dreamed it could be ten years ago. Most of the time I have this illusion of control because I have so many skills and tools at hand that when something breaks down I'm comfortable pausing and figuring out what to do for myself. This is awesome. 10/10. Highly recommend intense education about mental health for anybody who is dealing with illness personally, in the family, or dealing with other humans in general.

Much of the stuff written for popular consumption is either bullshit for money or is so watered down that it doesn't really explain why anything works for some people. Academic books are more expensive, harder to read, and often out dated even when they are published. Papers are often available on line and if paywalled will sometimes have contact information for the writer who is generally more than happy to shoot you a copy of their work.

And yet. With all of this work. With all of these skills. With all of the effort I put into dancing across the thin ice of functionality... Sometimes by brain, mind, and emotions refuse to work in any way that is useful or comfortable for me.

It feels like I'm driving down the road in a perfectly functional truck that has just come back from the garage and suddenly the steering drops out, the transmission kicks into 4WD low, and the accelerator is pinned to the floorboard. I feel like I can do nothing but scream while my truck and I lumber down the highway very slowly pushing every other car off into the ditch with inexorable malicious precision.

It kinda feels like suddenly realizing that I'm a character in a Stephen King novel. One of the really expendable ones who is offered up to show the brutality of the horrormacguffin.

This experience is bad. Not because it feels bad (it feels so bad) but because it is the kind of experience that leads to feelings that inspire me to give up on trying, give up on working, give up on developing my skills and talking with other people like me about our experiences. Makes me want to give up trying to be skillfull and spiral down into uncomfortable misery regardless of how it contradicts my values or harms those around me.

I crave the bourbon and the blackout and the desire to climb up on a bar and sing Fuck It All to the tune of Let It Go while convincing people to give me their undergarments so that I can knit them together into a proper diva boa to wear while I sing.

And that is why it is important that I essay when I feel like this and when I feel okay and when I feel great. While my illness is always with me, any state in which I find myself is always temporary.

This feeling will not last forever.

But it is likely to come back again in the future.

And when I am skillfull I can plan out how to work with myself in these times. But it's gotta be super simple or I won't remember and will not have the energy to execute complicated instructions.

So I turn on myself and I treat myself the way I would treat a confused and sickly child. The way I would like to be treated if I were a confused and sickly child. I eat what I want as long as I eat something. I take my meds and build the structure of my days around myself with that foundation. I check in with Spouse and my professionals. I make time to see what color things are and touch textures and listen to sounds around me. I find good smells and I sniff them.

And when it is all too much I curl up in a comfy blanket and feel sad and remind myself that this is temporary. This sucks, but it is not forever.

And for right now things are rough, but there is a blanket, and there is me, and that is enough to get through this breath. This breath. This breath. This breath.

I am not defined by my symptoms, but sometimes those symptoms define the boundaries of my world. If I try to run from them or hide them down they'll fester and burst forth with puss, violence, and harm. If I sit with them calmly, we'll sit there for a while, and then they will subside.

This feeling will not last forever.

Looking back down the hill...

I am so grateful for all of the people who went over this territory before I did and who helped me gain perspective and find a better way for myself. I remember them all as being patient with me and explaining things, but when I watch myself deal with people going through territory that I've covered I don't feel patient at all.

Of course, being patient and feeling patient are two completely different things. In the way that one can only be brave when afraid, one can only be patient (that is behave in a patient way) when one is not feeling patient.

And when I think back to those times when Those Who Traveled Before educated me most, it wasn't them being nice or gentle with me. It was more like a snap to my leash and a sudden jolt of attention to something that I needed to work on. Something that they weren't going to do for me. Something that I needed to notice.

Sometimes I'm talking with someone and I realize that they're completely activated. It's a lot easier to notice when I'm speaking with them in person or when I can hear their voice, but in chat I'll find that I'm sometimes reasonable and helpful when that person is so checked out on their own energy that they can't even perceive me.

It's not that they're not listening or that they don't care or that they don't want to make things better for themselves. It's that they are activated and their complex cognitive functions are offline. All they can perceive and process are gross perceptions and anything that doesn't align with their reality tunnel in that moment may well feel like a threat.

This is why we never tell a grieving person that their loved one is “in a better place” or a recently disabled person that it's “all part of god's plan” because in their reality tunnel in that time it is perfectly reasonable for them to bite our faces.

Intellectually I know that the only thing I can do once I realize someone else is caught in an activated state is back up and do my best to be as present as I can without adding any more energy to the situation. And, I don't want to sound petty, but that's boring as fuck. And it takes time. And while it's helpful for me to think about these situations, and to work through them emotionally from a distance, it feels a lot like sitting in a bar talking to someone drinking bourbon while I was in my first year sober.

But, I could do that now without any stressors.

Maybe in time it'll be easier to sit with people who are activated and not get annoyed and not make it worse and not have to fight to behave patient when I'm not feeling patient. But maybe I also need to work out a way to excuse myself from those conversations. Which means that I need to work out a way to determine when someone's reality tunnel has been hijacked by activation.

In person it's easy. The rigid eyes focused forward. The tension in the shoulders. The way the head tips back and pins the anxiety nerves in place. The vocal tone gets brittle and the diction staccato.

In text, I find that I have to do a little test by introducing an idea about a possible way forward other than the one that is being expressed. If the other person engages with that idea they don't seem to usually turn out to be activated. If they dismiss that idea and/or immediately jump to another issue, then that's probably a good sign that they're activated.

I think that this might mean that I need to learn how to not beat myself up for not noticing that someone IS activated BEFORE I've performed this test. I want to learn how to not feel like an asshole when I don't have the energy to engage mindfully with someone who is in an activated reality tunnel.

See, I don't get an option when P is in an activated reality tunnel. I'm her caregiver and the most I can do is sit quietly and not pour energy into her storm. I can't walk away because it's my responsibility to keep her from harming herself. (She's got advancing alzheimer's) I can walk into the other room or disengage, and I do that, but I don't have the option of saying, “I'm leaving this engagement completely.” With other people, I can. And I need to because I don't have that luxury with her.

Also, I'm not sure how to explain it to someone (I'd never even try while they're in the tunnel) because it sounds completely batcrackers. Like, “When you're activated your complex cognitive processing is offline and my complex cognitive processing will go into overdrive to predict the chances of you harming me so... could we just not talk until we're on even levels of cognitive function, please?”

That sounds too much like, “You're too emotional.” “Why can't you be rational?”

Oh, wait. I see it now. See, I just typed it. People in activated states read as threats to me and my initial response is to probe and determine the full level of hazard.

Well, isn't that interesting.

So, in a way, I think that my willingness to disengage from someone who is activated might be a huge sign of growth for me. I don't feel a compulsion to continue pushing the buttons until the bomb goes off just so I don't have to endure the tension of there maybe being a bomb.

Yeah, I just paused to look up intellectualization and Bipolar Disorder and that is apparently a thing we do. Which would have been really useful for me to have known some years ago. When my psychs and therapists have told me that I seem to be intellectualizing it has always sounded like a judgement or a scold that I'm doing something wrong, but it makes sense that it's a symptom and if I wouldn't have to use it to notice it and be able to work with it that would be a lot less recursive.

But... knowing that it is a symptom means that I can identify hallmarks of it and pay attention to when it happens and work the DBT and CBT skills to help myself live more skillfully.

Huh. I wasn't expecting my frustration over someone else's symptoms to lead me to new insight on my own symptoms. But that's the Universe for you. Always ready to point out how far I am down the hill when I start complaining about the people who are farther down the hill than I am.

When I start thinking about the hill I could might think that it's time to go back to thinking about the swamp. Hills imply a consistent level of change in a specific direction. Swamps are whimsical and have hummocks and channels in seemingly random places.

Am I talking too much? I feel like I”m talking too much. But it doesn't feel pressured or compulsive. And I'm sleepy. So I'm going to shower and tuck into bed.

Transitional spaces and liminal phases

A long time ago I decided that I wanted to change one thing about myself. This turned out to be a little bit like wanting to change the weathervane on top of an old farmhouse. I couldn't get to the vane without fixing the roof, I couldn't get to the roof without replacing the gutters, I couldn't replace the gutters without repairing the siding, I couldn't repair the siding without fixing the walls, and I couldn't fix the walls without completely undercutting and recreating the foundation.

At each step of my work I've uncovered what seems to be a completely unconnected issue that needs to be addressed before any other work can be done. Behind my anger was my drinking, behind my drinking was PTSD, behind the PTSD was C-PTSD, behind that seemed to be either BPD or Bi-Polar disorder, underneath all of that was a certain flavor of neurodivergence that doesn't have an official name but adds a kind of spice to everything I attempt based on the reports of neurotypical folks.

It might be thanks to my neurodivergence that I am completely willing to start learning about any psychological method or biological system from whatever heavy, dry, academic books and papers I can find. I've worked with some great professionals, some mediocre professionals, and some that probably would have turned me off the process completely had they not hit my stubborn streak hard with their fuckups.

Doing all this work on myself is really a pretty small thing. It involves a lot of study and a lot of thinking and a lot of making time to sit with my feelings and pay attention to them as carefully as I would if they were the feelings of someone about whom I care very much. The thing that I really didn't expect was how much I would be free to leave behind me as I grew and changed.

When I stopped drinking there were friends that I lost because they only liked drunk me. That was painless. Then there were the friends who had learned to work with my drinking to keep me manageable and useful to them. That was very painful. Also, I didn't have the language to explain what was happening to me at that point and so leaving them behind felt like it was cruel on my part when it was, in truth, me stepping away from someone whose survival skills and socialization had prepared them to manage and control someone very complicated and compromised. I don't believe that they treated me like that intentionally. I believe that they did so with full caring and intent to be kind. But once I was sober those old controls no longer worked on me and I became unpredictable and disappointing in equal measure.

Now I'm finding that there are even larger swaths of connections and ideals that I'm losing because they don't really matter any more to me.

I think that maybe those were once the things that told me who I was. That helped me craft an identity and give me a place where I fit, even if I didn't feel like I belonged.

Part of this is probably that my life is very completely focused on values based living in action. Alzheimer's elder care for P is not easy, but doing it is important to me that it is done well. Supporting R through his cancer experience isn't easy but it's important to me that it is done well. Taking care of this house and raising this dog well is important to me. None of it is very difficult or any different than any other job I've done, but none of it really requires me to have an identity.

When arguing with a person with Alzheimer's it is absolutely useless to have opinions or to make valid points. That person is in such a different reality tunnel that even communicating is challenging. Taking offense or feeling pleased are equally devoid of any effect other than provoking my own feelings which leads to changed energy. Feeling pleased and safe is good but taking offense is dangerous because of emotional contagion. P picks up on my feelings and amplifies them back at me. This doesn't mean that I can fix everything by being happy and easy going all the time because P's perspective on my emotions is deeply flawed and if P is in a fighting mood everything that they pick up will add fuel to their fire.

When accompanying a person through a cancer diagnosis and treatment, it's really not helpful to become emotionally or cognitively overwhelmed. It is important to save the emotional reactions for later so that one can use one's time with the doctors to untangle the confusing data and make the best choices. With R it's most important that I understand and translate the information into terms that he can understand and help him make the best choices (and also to make those choices for him when he is not able to do so).

Neither of these jobs require me to be anybody. I simply have to function as an attentive and curious being who chooses actions based on safety, health, and well-being. These jobs also require me to take care of myself first so I'm not impeded by my own hunger, tiredness, frustration, or chemical imbalances. That's possibly the most useful thing about my present situation. By my own values, taking care of myself is my first priority. Taking my meds. Making my food and eating as soon as I get an opportunity. Getting enough rest. Finding tools and hacks to make life easier. Asking for help so much more often than I'm comfortable doing.

This lifestyle is not reinforcing a persona or an identity on me. I am a being. My role is caretaker. And that frees up so much of the bullshit that I had in my former life with people's expectations of me being a certain kind of social or a certain kind of useful to them. I suspect it might be something like going on a year long retreat into a monastery. Being freed from those expectations is priceless and while the lack of others telling me who I am supposed to be can be scary at times, I'm finding that discovering who I am being when I am alone is far far more comfortable than it ever was before.

The world is made up of liminal spaces and life is a series of transitional experiences. When we feel like we're trapped in a cage or stuck in a rut, we're probably transitioning into a loop or pattern rather than not making process. We might simply be reinforcing the status quo with every moment rather than changing it. That is, itself, a type of change.

Today I needed to self-motivate hard to get dinner done. Simple dinner but everything needed doing quickly and then to be served quickly. I put on Snow Crash and listened to the whole “deliverator” sequence and powered through the work at a high rate of speed. It's such a beautiful first chapter. It helps that the first time I heard it, I was in a bad rut and a friend came over and simply started reading it aloud to me. The rhythm, the vocabulary, the meanings expressed through words that are new to the reader but immediately make sense because of the way they sound and feel.

That rush of energy. The intensity of the focus on the job and the soft disdain for every other job and every other person. It helped me feel alive and connected to the act of cooking and doing a “menial” and “trivial” task as though my life depended on doing it right and in time.

Sometimes mindfulness on a single task simply does not fit into my lifestyle of living by my values. Last night I caught myself applying lotion to my skin while I was brushing my teeth. I thought that I should really slow down and focus on one task at a time. Laughing I heard the voice that says, “where there's a should, there's a manager” because it's true.

Just as I finished up, P opened the bathroom door because she needed help using her refresher. If I'd done each task sequentially I would not have gotten one of those tasks done at all.

Any tool is useless.

I can get the most expensive sewing machine in the world, set it up perfectly in a room full of gorgeous fabrics and matching threads, and shut the door for a hundred years. When I come back there will be a dusty room full of dusty fabric and a machine that needs a serious clean up before it will be useful again.

If I have the most expensive sewing machine in the world and I have to go out and help a friend change a tire on the side of the road that machine is going to do very little for me other than maybe block traffic.

If I insist on bringing that machine with me everywhere I go just in case I might need to sew something out in the wild, I'm going to spend all of my energy on lugging the machine around and managing access to a power source. That might mean dragging a generator with me, or maybe solar panels.

I'm putting all of my energy maintaining a tool that is not actively serving me.

If I really need to sew something I can make a needle and I can pull a thread from my clothing.

Being able to use the tools at hand, or to fashion tools from what is at hand is far more effective and sustainable than trying to keep every tool that I might ever possibly need with me and functional at all times.

The mindfulness of doing one task at a time can be a great exercise for some people to use some times. For those of us who are neurodivergent or who have more things to get done in a specific set of time it's possible that mindful multitasking, or parallel working, or scientific method might be a similarly useful tool. But any time the tool becomes more important than the job, I think it might be time to step back, pause, and revisit values and goals.

Sometimes it's all about using someone else's narrative to help me get a new perspective on my situation. Sometimes it's about challenging my ability to do multiple things at the same time. Sometimes it's about finding a place where I can essay in peace without worrying about who is going to play at calling me on things or second guessing my lived experience. I need a break from that.

And that's why I'm pulling out my familiar tool of the essay in a new space under a new name and keeping everything public for now. Because I need to scream into the void and I can't do that if I'm walking on eggshells.

I know this tool and I love this tool and while it's not always the right tool for the job it exists only in my mind and doesn't take up much space even there.

All tools are useless, and the right tool for the job is priceless.