The State of Polyamorous Men in Indiana

Happy Late Festivus bitches.  I have some things to say to polyamorous men everywhere.

Okay, just the ones in Indiana.  I don’t know if it’s better in other places, and I pray to the gods and goddesses of heterosexuality that it is.  Hmm.  Who are the gods and goddesses of heterosexuality?  I’m inclined to say Cupid & Psyche, Adam & Eve, and Zeus & Hera as the initial grab bag–oh, okay I see the problem.

I don’t need to womansplain how lonely heterosexual polyamorous men are, but I do know how lonely they are, because they tell me all the time.

Continuing to state the obvious, a sapphic awakening is happening in the midwest.  Maybe it’s nothing new, I just got here (to the midwest and my mid thirties).   But I’ve been in the poly community since college.  And I can say for a fact that adult bisexuals across the state are switching out their eels for clams.  Even in Muncie.  Even the ones with a Live, Laugh, Love tattoo on their lower back.

I know this will be a tough read for straight men, who are about as sensitive as the shower knob of my low-income apartment at 6AM.  But times are getting dire.  Over 90% of my poly male friends in their 30s and 40s are looking for women in their mid 20s because they can’t keep up with the rising standards of disappointed women.  If heterosexual, polyamorous relationships are going to survive, straight men are going to have to evolve.

My demisexual, “relaxed-straight” husband agrees.  “Men are physically attractive,” he once told me.  “The only reason I’m not into them is because I need an emotional attachment to be interested in sex, and that’s not something most men can offer.”

So.  From a jaded bisexual who has done her time and seen some shit, and from a teacher with a heart for people in need, here are four steps that you as a strong, independent, cis-het-poly man can take to begin to look like a viable option to women your own age.

1. It’s time to read another polyamory book.  

Or…any relationship book.  If it has words and it’s about feelings, it’s for you.  Some of you never read your first one, and it shows.  I’m looking at you, “smartest person I’ve ever met.”  There is a plethora of digestible research about eroticism, kink, cohabitation, mental health, communication, and longevity.  That shit matters in polyamory, because–and I cannot stress this enough–polyamory is about relationships.

2. Become a feminist.  

Oh my god what?  Your penis won’t fall off, I promise.  You don’t have to pierce your septum or button your shirt all the way up.  You don’t even have to agree with every point a woman makes.  You just have to understand that a woman’s time and headspace are as valuable as your own.  Which means you need to…

-Participate in the planning process.  Schedule your scheduling.  This is polyamory, sweetiekins.  You can’t do it without planning.

-Remember things about her.

-Respond when she contacts you.  It doesn't have to be “right this minute,” but that's a window of a few days, tops. Being busy does not account for a week or more of radio silence.  Would you want her to ignore your text for 4 days?  We have shit to do too, and it would be nice to know where you fall in that shit.

-Respect her feelings.  If she apologies for having them, she’s testing you.

-Show pride in her accomplishments and intrigue in her hobbies.  You know, like she does for you.

If you don’t want to be treated like a vending machine, don’t treat your partner like one.  And before you argue that point (“...but I’d love a casual relationship that’s only based in sex!”), think about what happens when your time and headspace are not consistently taken into account (“I guess she’s not interested/too busy for me”).

Time and headspace are a part of sex, because they involve your physical, mental, and emotional presence.  The way you attach during sex is part of a neural network whose foundations begin from your caregivers at the beginning of life, and continue through your friendships and emotional connections growing up.  There is an abundance of research on attachment theory and how it manifests in our sexual lives.  The phrase “only sex” makes me wonder if you understand what sex actually is.

3. Go back to therapy.  

You’re not “done” simply because the panic attacks have stopped and you’re going to work regularly.  There are layers of insecurity beneath those episodes you’ve had, and it’s time to find your solid ground.  Women are human, and we’ll occasionally (accidentally) step on your triggers.  We need you to employ the strategies that a professional has taught you so you can communicate your boundaries to us with grace.  Which is, again, something that women have been doing for years and need you to meet us on.

4. Find the pattern.

Think about everything your previous, serious, compatible girlfriends have said to you when you started emotionally distancing yourself, which is about 3 months before those poor women finally cut ties.  Find the pattern.  I promise, it’s there, and it’s in the shape of a wound that you deserve to mend.  Pretend your pattern is a pokemon, and that you have to hack it in order to capture it.  It will take time, attention, and grace.  You deserve these things.

If all this humaning is too hard, remember that sex work exists.  Not everybody is cut out for polyamory, and there are lots of people who should not do it.  If you are unable to participate in more than one real relationship, but you still find yourself itching for more different sex (which there is no shame in, we’re only human), vending machine sex costs about $300, depending on who you hire and what they offer.  Paying for sex work will not emasculate you in the same way that paying for a doctor will not apostasize your physical health.  It’s a service, like therapy or car maintenance or dermatology.  Your identity is defined by you alone–not a collection of incels who don’t know what a clitoris is.  Treat sex workers with the same respect and veneration you treat your car guy.

And…for the love of Jesus Christ’s holy sacrificial blood, never tell anyone that you truly believe you’re the smartest person you’ve ever met.  I really can’t go into this further.  I just…you have to trust me on this one.

 

Enter the Coven

 A seal had broken in me.  A wearing away of intoxicating fantasies about love, worthiness, and power.  Screams echoed around my topography like growth rings in a tree.

When it breaks, the loose people who are barely hanging on fall away.  I am buoyant, freezing, and directionless, itching for people I haven’t met yet.  And the guiding flame I pay $115 a week to ask me why before I sob I don’t know tells me of the ancient stories of wild women.

My childhood best friend (snarky, nerdy, and frontal-lobe focused) was the first person to ever call me a witch.  He did it out of respect for a power that few people in his circle had–to create art that can affect a person’s emotions.  He wasn’t wrong–the baggage that comes with the term was also true throughout my life.  I was a pastor’s daughter.  Everything that made me a witch–voice, power, sexual freedom, creation, kinship with nature, respect for the divine–had to fall under the confines of God’s comfort level.

Even when I became an atheist, the scientific community where many of my friends thrived was too narrow-minded for me.  What they couldn’t measure wasn’t real, and wasn’t worth believing.  Even as the mysteries of human behavior continued to accumulate reliable data (psychology, sociology, physiology, etc), it was execrated as “soft,” or pseudoscience.

But now I am thirty-six going on fifty.  I am not interested in wasting headspace on people who deplete me, and my witch identity has nothing to do with them.  It has to do solely, exclusively, purely, with my power.

Enter the coven.  There is one thing every witch has in common.  She will not, she refuses, to hold back.  She wears what she wants.  She says what she wants.  She fucks who she wants.  Which is often no one at all.  

I walk into a circle of women whose power radiates from them and dances like a fire.  I am holding beer, and it spills as I excitedly gesticulate.  We cackle.  We scream.  We tell our stories and cast quick, shallow healing spells on each other, because we know the real healing happens alone.

I realize I have known these women my entire life, that I have been these women all my life.  We were in girl scouts, choir, and SAT prep.  We wore lace up boots to church.  We had Nightmare Before Christmas pajama pants.  We dressed up as characters from British fantasies for Halloween.

But I ignored them in my younger years, because we were all so quiet in public.  Instead, I was chasing people I thought were funny, but were actually just cruel.  I thought they were intelligent, but they were just articulately judgmental.  

Even after this realization, leaving them and learning to avoid these characteristics, I still chased after some form of acceptance that diminished me.  The love-bomber who all of a sudden becomes too busy.  The entrancing scientist who is conveniently vague when it comes to feelings.  The brilliant artist who is interested in a mirror, but not a whole woman who creates her own art.  The one who slips further out of reach the more you talk about “emotional load” or “repair attempts.”  The one who always describes you as “cool” or “will always be there.”  The one who says “You’re more attractive now than when I met you.”  (Neg me harder, crypto daddy.)  The one who is reading this right now and thinks, “None of those are me,” and is ready to mansplain what a feminist witch awakening is in the comments.

That’s when you’re supposed to leave.  But that’s exactly when my cancer came out.  Because acceptance from them felt like a lightning rush.  Because every representation of love told me to look for the surge of being noticed, of showing up and receiving eye contact, and I crumpled myself into antimatter to taste that rich, delicious drop.

We don’t see stories about the magic of communication and follow-through.  We don’t know how to receive someone who wants our disagreement, our difficulty, our loud opinions, our inconvenience.

Enter the coven.

Uncrumpling myself, I brush myself clean of the unworthiness festering in the wrinkles.  I realize there has been a societal effort to keep me crumpled since before Salem.  The first story of a woman in Western Christian texts is about the evilness of her choosing knowledge and power.  And her evilness of tempting (otherwise known as offering a pitch to) her male partner, who clearly can’t make this decision on his own.

I step into the power of women around me, and I feel my own expand outward and deepen inward.  I feel the divinity of women–even the ones I disagree with or have different vibrations from.

I am looking forward to all the exciting landmarks in this shift.  I’m done with stories about heterosexual romance.  They couldn’t be less interesting to me.  Give me Kaley Cuoco’s Harley Quinn.  Give me NK Jemisin.  Give me Mya Spalter.  Give me side-splitting 40-something lesbians at the back of the bar who answer to no one and smoke when they want to.  

It’s time to live deliciously.

Self-Care for the Empath Writer: The Letter that You Never Send.

Writing isn’t just for an audience or publication.  It isn’t just so you can wear a tweed jacket with thick glasses and “prove something” to the critical voice in your head–which by the way, never came from you, but is a combination of the least supportive (and most expensive) writing instructor you’ve ever had and the family members who keep asking how much you’re making on that skill.

Writing isn’t about any of that.  For one, becoming a “skilled” writer (whatever the fuck that means) is generally a financial waste, which is why you keep being bothered by your family members about it.  Secondly, that unsupportive writing instructor actually has no investment in your growth and spiritual development as a writer.

The question you need to answer is what brought you to the page in the first place?  What agony needs to be given shape?  What clogged scream needs to storm the barricades?

Writing is, primarily, a private act.  It is between your brain stem and your frontal lobe.  You cannot go backwards, logic to feeling, which means you cannot start with criticism.  You must always start from within and go outwards.  From the writer you were before you showed your writing to anyone.

Criticism does not belong at our centers.  Nor does anyone else.  Which is what brings me to the title of this piece–the letter that you never send.

As an empath, I consciously screen every word I speak through the ears of my audience.  Whatever I get across needs to 1) avoid their triggers, 2) validate them, and 3) empower them.  I endeavor far more messages that will be read by another, than will only be read by me, and exist solely for my learning.

The “Letter That You Never Send” is a letter that you pretend they will understand; not one they actually will.  When a 6-year relationship ended 3 years ago, I began letter after letter after letter, but kept stopping myself because I knew he wouldn’t get it.  I was allowing the outer world to influence the inner world.  Each time I stopped myself was with the same stifled disappointment I felt in our conversations–stonewalling myself and editing myself, because I knew I was speaking to an earless void.  In my stem, I didn’t know who I was writing that letter for.

It’s about you, honeybun.  Writing is always about you.  You have to start from the inside out.  That’s the whole goddamn process.  Those who criticize this writer or that writer for being “self-indulgent” have a funny idea of what writing is truly about.

The word “aubade” comes to mind here (allow me to flex my tweed jacket and thick glasses for a moment).  It is a 17th century poem (SNORE) written about the separation of love at dawn–originally, to a sleeping woman (perhaps she fell asleep during a lecture about 17th century poetry).  

What I’m saying is, we’ve always been doing this.  If the poem is written to a sleeping woman, who is this song really for?

Wherever the energy between you and your loved one diverged, garden the space with your words.  Not for them, but because you deserve flowers in the empty space. 

Post-Severance Reflections on Work

Growing up in a baptist home, my earliest ideas about Hell were quite primal–constant physical agony, fire, torture, “weeping and gnashing of teeth.”  They became slightly nuanced when I read CS Lewis’s The Great Divorce and deeper when I saw Richard Mattheson’s What Dreams May Come, which spoke to my developing agnosticism.  It wasn’t until Lorcan Finnegan’s Vivarium (which spoke to my solidifying atheism) that I started understanding “modern hellscape” as an emerging genre of storytelling.  

Like science fiction, hellscapes give us an alternate reality where we can run through believable scenarios, change one thing, and learn something about our identity and values as humans.  Also like science fiction, the variable tends to deal with either new technology (Black Mirror, Westworld), environmental discoveries (Color Out of Space, Annihilation, Sphere, Solaris) or medical advancements (Maniac, Altered Carbon, and the show that inspired this piece, Severance).

Within the first episode, Severance tells us that it knows exactly what it is.  The boss of the company, Miss Cobel, advises the protagonist with the following:

My mother was an atheist. She used to say that there was good news and bad news about hell. The good news is, hell is just the product of a morbid human imagination. The bad news is, whatever humans can imagine, they can usually create.  

What separates a hellscape from a horror is the believability.  Mark H isn’t trapped in a lake of fire or a pit of skulls.  He’s trapped in the same carpeted, fluorescent prison we’re all trapped in.  He gets worker appreciation in the form of fruit platters and paper weights.  His compensation for a work-related injury is a gift card to a bar & grill.  Those details are what make the horror of his daily life resonate deeply in us.

The sheer amount of time and energy Mark spends at work is amplified through the show’s use of lighting.  We only see the sun when it is low in the sky–either on Mark's commute, or briefly right outside of a building to have a quick conversation.  The rest of the show takes place either in the bright synthetic lighting of an office, or in the cold blackness of night where his only work-free life exists.  

Even at an indoor book party, the characters float in a poorly-lit abyss of a life that allows little time for connection.  At the climax of Season One, Mark fights his way through a current of meaningless interruptions–“You didn’t bring your own book?  Oh, shoot.  Hm.  Shoot.  Maybe you can share with someone”–to have one single, life-defining conversation with his sister.

Do we live in hell?  Are we stuck in a bottle episode of our careers?  Why does Mark’s horrific life look so much like ours?

“Let’s chat about something I bet you have heard of, the ‘work life balance,’ ” Mark tells his coworker Helly (hmmm.  Hell-y.) on her first day.  “To start, imagine yourself as a seesaw.”

That’s the moment I jumped out of my crumb-sprinkled couch and pointed at the screen.  Had they been reading my diary?  Yeah, of course I’ve fanticized cloning myself to be my work-errand-cleaning slave so I could write and play and have sex all day like a king.  

I love my career.  I know this because I ask myself every evening if I love it, as I put my bag down, look at my running shoes, and fight the urge to nap.  It’s a losing battle.  I can’t help but harbor a little resentment when so little of my energy is left for just me.  

Miss Cobel, I too am an atheist, which makes Time more powerful than either of us.  And this art witch refuses to die before it’s my time.  But I can’t snap my fingers and change the weight of the market, or the anthropology of economics, or the universal pattern of power and slavery.  And what Severance teaches us is that the fantasy of “leaving it at the door” wouldn’t actually make us happier, and it certainly wouldn’t give us more time.

So I wake up, center myself, hunt for joy through fervent meditation, and bring it to work.  Not Garden-of-Eden joy, mind you–I mean rebellious, stupid, silly, gritty joy.  I dance my way down the halls and make goofy faces at my coworkers.  I approach conflict as a challenging puzzle, which means that solving it counts as play.  I compose my prosody and body language like an opera.  When a compromise is reached, I sing a victory song from old video games.

I can do all these things and still meet 85% of my daily expectations, which is a fine number.  Severance might even call it a “happy” number.  Some things don’t get done.  But I can love myself enough to foster the joy I deserve in a work culture that I can’t change.

I’m not happy everyday.  Some days I message my husband, “Kill me please.  Have mercy on my dying corpse.  For the love of Christ, cut my arteries,” and I have to remind myself that the end will come soon enough.  The hellish truth to our lives is that work is a constant, inescapable shackle that occupies most of our corporeal allotment on this earth, leaving us paltry crumbs when it is time to clock out.

The good news about hell isn’t that it’s fake–it’s very real, and we’re very much stuck here.  The good news is that our inner world…our whole inner world…still belongs to us.  As Orwell wrote in his most famous hellscape (1984), “If you can FEEL that staying human is worthwhile, even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them.”  

So maybe, definitely, shirk something.  Find one thing on your plate that no one checks, and banish it to fluorescent oblivion–as bright as forgetfulness, as invisible as the question, “What was that thing?”  Because our brains need space and stimulation to be creative.  Because creativity is a human right.  And as we can see from the diminishing sunsets in Severance, it actually can’t wait until 5 PM.

Unclogging Spiritual Chakras: Evolution vs Constance

In my Christian upbringing, the theme of constancy was holy and revered.  God never changes; He is always the same and always will be the same.  The Alpha and Omega, Beginning and End.  We should be like God.  Therefore, we should be constant, or at least approaching a universal standard of ethics.  Our love should last forever.  We should always forgive.  There is Right, and there is Wrong.

I am learning to embrace the different women I become, and the different ethics I develop as I understand the nuances of being human, of being alive.

Being alive means sailing in a whirlwind of physics.  The chaos of electrons as they swirl around the nucleus like flies around a light.  As your prefrontal cortex grabs the windbag of sparkling entropy and steers it in a direction based on code.  The code that you are continuing to write every day.

Your ethics are supposed to change.  The universe is breathing and branching, and you are a glowing branch.  Which means sometimes you have to bend, because that's where the forces are taking you, and that's where your light will keep shining.

You're not inconsistent.  You're learning.  

You weren't wrong.  You're growing.

There is nothing more holy than that.

Kiss, Cry, Repeat.

Wednesday, at the peak of my spring break, I took care of a very sad girl.  It was the kind of day where playing video games was an accomplishment.  I believe this was my schedule:

9:00 AM:  Wake Up  

10:00 AM:  Get out of bed, figure out of I’m going out or not

11:00 AM:  Eat something, realize I’m not going anywhere

12:00 PM:  Video Games

2:00 PM:  Cry & nap

4:00 PM:  Wake up & cry

4:30 PM:  Rumination time–fight, give in, fight, give in…

5:00 PM:  Snack, cry, sit with an open book on my lap that I don’t read while I play Solitaire on my phone

6:00 PM:  Get ready for a date with my husband

Throughout the day, I had a deep fear of this kind of unsustainable, debilitating sorrow.  “I can’t love like this anymore,” I admitted.  “It hurts too much.  I get too vulnerable.  I can’t sacrifice days like this to just feeling.  I have things to do.  I can’t be a pathetic lug like I was in my twenties before I went on meds.  Monogamy is safer.  You don’t have days like this in monogamy.  Where does the pain actually end?  I can’t even wrap my mind around the immensity of it.”

And in that concerto of self-doubt, regret, and melancholy, the only voice of comfort was the knowledge that it would end soon.

I don’t like that the only comfort is temporality, because I don’t like temporality.  I want to believe in everlasting existence, in life-after-death, in eternal love, in “we’ll last forever.”  The very source of my anguish was that I missed my long-distance boyfriend who had just left for home–the temporality of our visits, our moments together.  To say, “don’t worry…this will pass,” is like saying, “don’t worry, you’ll die someday.”

There was another voice too.  Not so much a comfort as a law of emotional physics.  It was the symmetry of “I can’t keep loving like this.”  

This is the other side of love.  

This is the antithesis to “my heart is so full that I can’t contain all of this joy.”  It is the other side of the looking glass–a shadow to every beam of light.  Waking up and wanting the day to be over instead of at its beginning.  The immobilizing weight of nothing, of isolation, of the off-switch.  

How does oblivion cohabitate right next to connection and exuberance?  It’s just a few hormonal shifts down the hall from it.  They’re fucking neighbors, which seems to negate the very foundation of what oblivion is, or why we fear it.  How can death be final…but oblivion be temporal?

Whatever it is, it’s not a comfort; it’s a law.

Admittedly, I do find something grounding about laws.

Maybe all I’m realizing is how small I am.  Joy and grief are both bigger than me, but they’re a package deal.  If I make room in my calendar for one, I better make room for the other.  Because she’ll just let herself in regardless.

Keep your video games handy, my friends.

Look for the one flea that is laughing

Sometimes a joke hits you really personally.

One of my favorite Louis CK jokes is when he talks about performing some self-love directly after 9/11.  Specifically, he said it was "Some time between the falling of the first tower, and the second tower.  Because I figure, if I didn't, then the terrorists win."

I don't know if I can accurately describe what this joke means to me.  That in the face of tragedy, one would dare to laugh.  One would dare to tell a childish, morally irredeemable joke.  One would dare to be happy.  It's like taking your pain and throwing a knife in its gut.  The pain will come back, of course.  With a vengeance.  It doesn't go away because we stand up and yell, in our most melodic Nelson Muntz impersonation, "HA ha!!"  First up, and then down.

But laughing at pain does something inside us.  It pits grit against grit.  The gravitational vortex of grief pulls you into the vacuum of time, and laughter is a crumb of a moment that is your own.  It is a dry-heave when you're drowning.  It is a sandy oxygen tank.  Maybe it's no more noble than saying "You can't do worse to me than I could already do to myself."  But as Atreyu tells the assassin of the amorphous Nothing, "If we're going to die anyway, I'd rather die fighting."

Galway Kinnell's masterpiece Book of Nightmares contains two quotes that I'm heavily considering getting tattoo'd on me.  One is "the wages of dying is love," meaning that the darkness of mortality leaves us with no other option but to connect with each other for short time we have.  The second quote is darker, and means the same thing.  "On the body, on the blued flesh, when it is laid out, see if you can find the one flea which is laughing."

If you're struggling today, try to find the flea that is laughing, and then find what he is laughing at.  And then practice a smile.  Because you have to keep going, because we're dying anyway, because you deserve to smile, and most importantly, because if you don't, then the terrorists win.

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