greenstorm | Secrets

Morning has always felt like my secret time. It's the space where no one else is awake, no one else is functional, and when I am most alive. It's the space for productive, internal solitude. It's the space where I haven't yet started reacting to all the day's events, so I can check in with myself about where I am as a sort of baseline. It's the space for tidying my house and my mind before the onslaught of the day.

Where I am right now is a little lonely, a little isolated. When my brother was staying here we were rarely home at the same time, but when we were we talked. I liked having that background of conversation, but more, I liked having conversations with someone who liked to talk as much as I did, who shared details of his day, and who I got along so well with. I had never really thought of family as different from other folks but with my brother there's a very similar underlying set of beliefs and habits that make interacting with him really comforting. It reminds me of how talking with Kynnin used to be; I feel quite normal, accepted, one person among many. I feel like someone else as opposed to very different from them.

It's a good feeling, and it gives one to think. I've been engaging with a lot of non-poly, non-geek, non-environmentally conscious folks lately, maybe people who are only one thing on that list, and often feel like I'm a curiosity in folks' lives. I'm that weird object on the menu ordered to be exotic, or picked up in a foreign country that is cool because they cannot make heads or tails of me. Sometimes maybe I'm enjoyed despite my differences. Either way I'm othered by a lot of the folks I'm hanging out with lately, and it's isolating and it's difficult on my ability to treat myself well. And perhaps a lot of these folks are not so much curious about my life experiences and what informs them and how they are constructed so much as that they exist, and that's enough for them.

I feel, maybe, a little unseen.

There are good parts of spending time with these folks, of course. I learn about other perspectives, I have a wider sense of the world, it's interesting, I get to figure out how other folks work at a deeper level. But they are not my home, not my family, and not my chosen family. Many of them are newcomers to my life. In hindsight it is maybe a little silly to have spent all this wok making lovely chosen family and friends and not spend much time with them. Why do I do that right now? I don't know.

Either way, I am beginning the process of dismantling this house, searching for another (oh, is the searching process ever a frustrating one!) and shifting my life. I want to keep an eye on this process. I want to shift to something that includes a little more family, which I guess is part of the goal of moving anyhow, and where I feel a little more accepted.