It's never isolation
Jan. 13th, 2021 03:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greenstormI've spent a lot of time here with the animals over the last few years. Most of my emotional or intimate contact is with them -- intimate in the sense of showing the self and being shown, intimate in the sense of shared experiences, and intimate in the sense of shared time and daily routine.
Animals know their boundaries and they communicate them. When a boundary is communicated to animals they don't tell stories about what else it means, they just do their thing. It's relaxing to be around. Most people seem to neither know what they want nor what they can't or shouldn't tolerate. People are always telling stories about what other folks' actions mean: they don't love me anymore, they care about me too much, they want or don't want this or that.
This is the source of a lot of healing for me. Being poly, being cometary or intermittent, being gender nonconforming, so much has been put on me in my life. What I want or do moment to moment stands in, not just for what I want in that moment, but for what I'm believed to want on every scale. What I do with my body stands in for what I think about other people or the world. Non-normativity means folks don't have a range of stories from which to draw, and non-normative folks are often cast as fickle villains in the few stories we have.
The cats sleep scattered around me while I'm working most days and I enjoy it. It's good to share space with living things, to watch sides rise and fall with breath and paws twitch with dreams. It's good to reach out and to be reached out for intermittently. It's good to say no and have Whiskey go and sleep on the far end of the couch in a sunbeam and the world does not end.
I've been snuggling with the dogs before bed. They come in if they want it, or if they're busy they'll stay outside or get up and take a few steps away and I respect that. When they're not into it I feel sad, but not rejected. A withdrawal one night doesn't mean they won't come back other nights. It doesn't mean they won't be happy to see me when I come out the next morning to do chores, or that they wont invite belly rubs later on. It just means, not now.
A dog or a cat will be patient for awhile and then enforce their boundaries. Like people, their boundaries are sharper when they're stressed. It almost never gets to that point though: I'm not sure if my dogs have ever growled at me even, and I've never been bitten or intentionally scratched by the cats.
Geese too are seasonal in their affections. During mating season they pair off, just like humans in the throes of NRE, and don't want to be disturbed while they're nesting. After awhile they come back and recoalesce into a social group that murmurs and shouts and shares thoughts unselfconsciously. There is no sense of recrimination after that absence.
So many of the people around me tell stories about their own boundaries that they can't communicate them clearly: they communicate about hope or aspirational self-negation rather than about what exists.
I think it might be hard to go back to that, in the after-times.
Animals know their boundaries and they communicate them. When a boundary is communicated to animals they don't tell stories about what else it means, they just do their thing. It's relaxing to be around. Most people seem to neither know what they want nor what they can't or shouldn't tolerate. People are always telling stories about what other folks' actions mean: they don't love me anymore, they care about me too much, they want or don't want this or that.
This is the source of a lot of healing for me. Being poly, being cometary or intermittent, being gender nonconforming, so much has been put on me in my life. What I want or do moment to moment stands in, not just for what I want in that moment, but for what I'm believed to want on every scale. What I do with my body stands in for what I think about other people or the world. Non-normativity means folks don't have a range of stories from which to draw, and non-normative folks are often cast as fickle villains in the few stories we have.
The cats sleep scattered around me while I'm working most days and I enjoy it. It's good to share space with living things, to watch sides rise and fall with breath and paws twitch with dreams. It's good to reach out and to be reached out for intermittently. It's good to say no and have Whiskey go and sleep on the far end of the couch in a sunbeam and the world does not end.
I've been snuggling with the dogs before bed. They come in if they want it, or if they're busy they'll stay outside or get up and take a few steps away and I respect that. When they're not into it I feel sad, but not rejected. A withdrawal one night doesn't mean they won't come back other nights. It doesn't mean they won't be happy to see me when I come out the next morning to do chores, or that they wont invite belly rubs later on. It just means, not now.
A dog or a cat will be patient for awhile and then enforce their boundaries. Like people, their boundaries are sharper when they're stressed. It almost never gets to that point though: I'm not sure if my dogs have ever growled at me even, and I've never been bitten or intentionally scratched by the cats.
Geese too are seasonal in their affections. During mating season they pair off, just like humans in the throes of NRE, and don't want to be disturbed while they're nesting. After awhile they come back and recoalesce into a social group that murmurs and shouts and shares thoughts unselfconsciously. There is no sense of recrimination after that absence.
So many of the people around me tell stories about their own boundaries that they can't communicate them clearly: they communicate about hope or aspirational self-negation rather than about what exists.
I think it might be hard to go back to that, in the after-times.
no subject
Date: 2021-01-15 05:00 pm (UTC)