Love in the time of coronavirus

I haven't even read the original book, but the title's been ringing in my head for a week now.

This post may be shorter than expected because my counterpart at work is sick with a cold. Not coughing, definitely a weird throat. I'm still learning my position and I already had an avalanche of work coming down before Mar31 fiscal year end. But. I need to talk my way through the last couple days.

Avi came up.

https://greenstorm.dreamwidth.org/2007/03/12/

We'd started our original thing in July 2006. That was the month Kynnin gave me back my dad's necklace. At that point in my life I was travelling around a lot, even just within the local area: music festivals, my Shambhala year, my permaculture course. At one point I write: "Before the permaculture course, I hadn't spent two weeks worth of nights in the same place since... Can it have been three years?" I had three other partners total and a lot of show rats that I was breeding and loving. I had not yet been raped by my friend. I would move in with Bob in fall, then move with him again that winter when our basement suite collapsed. Summer 2007 I moved to Kelowna for the season and that was the start of my outdoor landscaping career. I was learning that my mental health was patterned but I didn't yet have a sense of partnership with and love for my emotions. They happened like the weather: I was beginning to realise there were seasons, but not that I could use them to water gardens and go sledding down the hill for fun.

I broke up with him March 2007. Any efforts to rekindle didn't stick. It has been many, many years since I'd seen him at this point.

I hardly remember so much of it. Reading back, things I thought were spread out over years all happened at once. Reading back, that is the life I have spent the last couple years escaping. Reading back from now, where I am in my power, I'm amazed there was enough of me for anyone to see me or love me.

Avi was always beautiful to look at, always compelling in the way that when I was with him it took such a distinct effort to leave his presence. There's exquisite chemistry there. This journal says I was avoidant despite enjoying him. That was the history.

I understand so much more about everything now, but I'm here to talk about my experience of this extended weekend.

I started out nervous, thinking that perhaps I'd made a mistake. I always -- you know, I go after prey animals, and as both a sadist and as a lover I am conflicted. I want to cherish my people, I want to hurt them, but I don't want them to be hurt. And so often I'll keep my distance from someone because I feel that through caring about me they'll be hurt in exactly the way I don't want to hurt them. I feel I'll let down their faith in their ability to be loved, so of course I avoid them and they feel unloved and unlovable.

Every thread of this leads away back into myself. I don't want to go there into the past. I want to stay in this week.

We spent five days together. Even from the airport he was more present in himself than I ever remembered. His self had developed enough boundaries and enough mass that I could feel its gravity. It was not quite like being with a new person because I already trusted him, and every word out of his mouth confirmed that I should. He didn't feel like his past self to my eyes, but he still felt extraordinarily familiar. It was like the best parts of being with a stranger and exploring, and being with a longterm lover and feeling comfortable.

But. But. Then he opened his mouth.

I was his first poly relationship and he'd been poly since then. Each relationship he'd had, considered, learned from and can speak fluently about his lessons both good and bad. He knows his boundaries. He knows what his emotional capacity is, what his emotional skill level is, and he can speak about that fluently. He knows himself, his emotions both "negative" and "positive", and he can analyze them and integrate them and accept them and make room for them in his life.

He has Done The Work. For what, thirteen years, he has been Doing The Work. And in doing so he has self-created, has become such a presence, has both rooted into stability and integrated into the world.

What a joy to see someone I care about doing well. What a joy to -- what's the line? -- reconnect, for the first time, and find an equal there. This is what I always needed him to be so I could be unafraid of hurting him, of trampling him, and here we are.

And he's happy to see me doing well, and he wants to see me again, which to me feels extraordinary.

So he'll come up again. It works out well for me, I'd been wanting another comet partner and wading into dating strangers wasn't working for me. I have absolutely and completely no idea what it will look like for frequency, for enmeshment in-between, for anything. Probably we'll talk about that at some point instead of just catching up on our mutual histories. We did more or less talk nonstop most of the time.

I already have a sense of where some of the challenges will lie but the field is wide open. I will report back.

But that's what I wanted to tell you. I'm very, very good. And I get to come home to Tucker, to drop back into that familiar love with new eyes. It's good.

It would be better if Tucker's trips back east and all plans to see his other partners and friends hadn't been cancelled, but I have the skills now to support and love him and not feel threatened by my inability to fix everything for him.

And I am home, in Threshold, which is exactly where I want to be.

Relationship as Plough

I want you to imagine a green field. Tall grasses, moss between their roots, wildflowers dotting the field. Everything waves back and forth in the wind. The field is working, it's functional, it produces grass from whatever soil is under there.

Plough that field in your mind. The plough blade drives through the soil. It cuts the grass rhizomes and turns the soil on top of them. Small creatures, worms and bugs, and the occasional larger vole are exposed to wriggle in the light. Suddenly you know - that's red clay the grasses are growing in! Or maybe it's black sand. Dig a little and you can figure an underlying landform, the age of the soil, how much water and freeze the past has given. The plough catches on bigger roots and pulls them out. Everything is laid bare for inspection. So much more is known. There's space for newly planted seeds to sink their roots. In time the disturbed rhizomes throw out fresh roots and green tops and re-grow; nothing need be lost. If there's a weed that must be removed those roots are now loosened and can be pulled free of the mass more easily.

Relationship is my plough. All my thoughts, motivations, assumptions, and behaviours get lifted into the light, examined, and leave me fertile for change or regrowth. Poly an excellent relationship plough, as are new relationships. They dig up so many things I'd never otherwise get a chance to know about myself. I need a certain amount of data to see patterns; I need novel circumstances to pick patterns out from background noise.

Once I find a pattern I can begin to look at why, and at what other patterns might otherwise fill that space:

I get frantic when people around me are hurt? Of course: it was never safe to be around dad when he was upset. It's actually ok to accept other people's emotions and support them gently in experiencing and exploring them though.

I feel responsible for people's emotions? Of course; that's a textbook hallmark of abuse. Of course people have feelings in response to our actions, but their choice about how to respond to those feelings (being vulnerable, asking for support, distancing, self-soothing) are their own and I don't really control the feelings folks will have. I only control my responses to their actions.

I am terrified and lonely when partners create distance with me? Of course; we have a social narrative that folks either share everything or they share nothing and probably hate each other. We also have poor social modeling around how to negotiate around spending time, attention, and love. The truth is that folks who are mindful about relationship with me and who are measured in the time and enmeshment level they offer are demonstrating commitment to something that is functional over the long haul, and demonstrating that they're able to look beyond conventional scripts and instead provide clear boundaries and make scripts of their own.

Those are all old examples that can always be dug deeper; there are so many more and also always new ones.

I like doing this work. I am an external processor so it comes out here or in conversation. I become more myself by doing this work. I take a better place in the world.

And there is a lot of it coming at me right now.

Relationship as Plough

I want you to imagine a green field. Tall grasses, moss between their roots, wildflowers dotting the field. Everything waves back and forth in the wind. The field is working, it's functional, it produces grass from whatever soil is under there.

Plough that field in your mind. The plough blade drives through the soil. It cuts the grass rhizomes and turns the soil on top of them. Small creatures, worms and bugs, and the occasional larger vole are exposed to wriggle in the light. Suddenly you know - that's red clay the grasses are growing in! Or maybe it's black sand. Dig a little and you can figure an underlying landform, the age of the soil, how much water and freeze the past has given. The plough catches on bigger roots and pulls them out. Everything is laid bare for inspection. So much more is known. There's space for newly planted seeds to sink their roots. In time the disturbed rhizomes throw out fresh roots and green tops and re-grow; nothing need be lost. If there's a weed that must be removed those roots are now loosened and can be pulled free of the mass more easily.

Relationship is my plough. All my thoughts, motivations, assumptions, and behaviours get lifted into the light, examined, and leave me fertile for change or regrowth. Poly an excellent relationship plough, as are new relationships. They dig up so many things I'd never otherwise get a chance to know about myself. I need a certain amount of data to see patterns; I need novel circumstances to pick patterns out from background noise.

Once I find a pattern I can begin to look at why, and at what other patterns might otherwise fill that space:

I get frantic when people around me are hurt? Of course: it was never safe to be around dad when he was upset. It's actually ok to accept other people's emotions and support them gently in experiencing and exploring them though.

I feel responsible for people's emotions? Of course; that's a textbook hallmark of abuse. Of course people have feelings in response to our actions, but their choice about how to respond to those feelings (being vulnerable, asking for support, distancing, self-soothing) are their own and I don't really control the feelings folks will have. I only control my responses to their actions.

I am terrified and lonely when partners create distance with me? Of course; we have a social narrative that folks either share everything or they share nothing and probably hate each other. We also have poor social modeling around how to negotiate around spending time, attention, and love. The truth is that folks who are mindful about relationship with me and who are measured in the time and enmeshment level they offer are demonstrating commitment to something that is functional over the long haul, and demonstrating that they're able to look beyond conventional scripts and instead provide clear boundaries and make scripts of their own.

Those are all old examples that can always be dug deeper; there are so many more and also always new ones.

I like doing this work. I am an external processor so it comes out here or in conversation. I become more myself by doing this work. I take a better place in the world.

And there is a lot of it coming at me right now.