Tag Archives: patterns

This is harder than it used to be.

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I’m still feeling comfortable in the walled garden. I think it is partly because my range of topics is limited and that guide is comfortable. I’m having a hard time writing here. I am more afraid of the consequences, partly because I will weave all the different categories together.

I’m really deep in my feelings, partly because there is a lot I shouldn’t do yet. Today is day 22 post-surgery. Tomorrow is week 27 without Noah. Six months and a week.

I keep thinking about Travel Boyfriend. That is a man who snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. I haven’t explained what happened here. Some day, not too far in the future, I will start cross-posting all the stuff I wrote while hiding in the walled garden. It will be intense. My apologies to the email receivers.

I will probably do statuses in batches else it would be truly unhinged. There are over 500 journal entries. A great many of them are 10+ minute reads. As always, read what you want to and skip what you don’t. Me writing is never a mandate that anyone needs to read it or respond to it.

I feel like I need to move the whole story here and I need to figure out more about making back ups. I suspect at some point I will want to wade in and steal chunks for books. They are coming. That’s probably going to be my post-kid career. I will have to figure out how to sell books. Ew.

What am I having a hard time saying here?

Noah and I were having a rocky phase because I needed to go back to being poly. I am not by nature a monogamous person. I have a lot of personality/self to go around. Absolutely no one wants all of me. Not even Noah. Noah thought he could command me to change and have me no longer have the parts he didn’t care for. I say “command” as if it was simple. We did close to 20 years of hypnosis play and NLP. We did thousands of hours of work. He tried very hard to change me to get rid of the parts he didn’t want.

I’m always going to fall in love with people. I have been hiding from that by staying home and not letting myself develop intense friendships since I moved here.

It takes around 400 hours of shared time to establish a friendship; it works best if this happens over a short time. It takes around 2 years to get into a secure bond in a relationship.

(I’m thinking about Gentleman, the man I am seeing.) To make the math easier I am going to assume 15 hours a week. Many weeks it has been more than that, a few it was less. We just passed 15 weeks. 225 hours. If I include the fact that there have been a few weeks with way extra because of helping me with surgery, 250 hours.

We very often have differences of opinions. We give each other funny looks, shrug, and move on. It is an easy relationship. He doesn’t irritate me much. Everyone irritates me.

I catch myself asking questions about how he interacted with the children of his ex’s. He has mostly dated single mothers and that has been a fraught experience in a few ways. Mostly in the sense of making him afraid to attach. That worries me a little.

I have to be honest that as I think about dating it is important to me that my children see me do so in a way that I would feel good about modeling. I need to only bring people around my children if they are good enough to be role models.

Why date? Why not just mourn?

I’m seeking sources of energy. My life takes a lot out of me. I can’t crumble into nothingness and go join the mushrooms in the forest. That option is not open to me. I have to move forward. That means I need to have energy. The big way I get a lot of energy is sex. I promise that I’ve tried a lot of other ways. Yeah, I need to do all the body maintenance stuff too like diet, exercise (I cross train like it is my job), time alone, and rest. I know.

I need the energy. I need it. I need to not feel like I am stumbling forward in a blind haze. If I stumble forward I am going to trip and fall and hurt myself. I need to step forward confidently, even when I am not confident.

So far Gentleman is willing to figure out what polyamory means. He has a shockingly open mind and easy going mannerisms. Part of me feels like I should test that in a meaningful way before he meets my kids. I say that because I know who I want to explore dating from my friend-group.

I actually told Noah a few years ago that I suspected that I would eventually want to date this exact woman. I want to get to know her better first, but she is deeply intriguing to me. I have worked with her on community stuff. I see her around. She always flirts, just a bit. It got slightly more obvious this weekend. Not overt. Not a demand. A very subtle offer.

I no longer want to pretend I don’t see these things. I don’t want to retreat and run away because that is what I am required to do. I want to show up, say yes, and see what happens. I’m going to court slow and steady. I might have a lot of vocabulary to teach. That’s fine. I’ve been training for that for my whole dang life.

There was excitement in casting a wide net for my first hunt. I can’t deny that. Coming out of it with someone I like as much as I like Gentleman makes such a wide net less attractive. Instead of putting that much energy into necessary failure I’d rather rest or talk to him.

That doesn’t mean I want to hop into monogamy and start shaping my life around him. I specifically don’t want that. I don’t want him trying to fill Noah’s shoes. That’s a really bad set up for all concerned.

I am the head of my household and that is going to stay true. I want to have good friends who are good role models for my kids. There will be a diverse array of role models because I want my kids to see that I really do believe that it takes all kinds. I’m not going out with a shopping list of “types”. That’s not my point at all.

I feel a spark with lots of people, historically. I have not allowed myself to feel this much since I moved here. I think I’m going to allow myself to flirt. I will see what happens. I don’t think I’m going to do frequent drift net fishing. And when I do, it will come with writing requirements.

Do you know part of what is hot about this woman? She’s written a lot down. I can go find out what it looks like in her brain. I like that a lot. I’m in for such a glorious ride. It’s going to be more awkward to navigate flirting because I don’t do that in front of my kids.

In order to keep it from being obvious who I am fucking I’m going to have to start spending time with a lot more people. That’s going to be fascinating to manage. It means that for all of the people I date, there will need to be a non-flirty friendship core. We will have to have a comfortable mode that involves no amount of sexual tension. I’m going to go back to acting like I did when the older kids were young. Very prudish in front of the children. No hand holding, no kissing, no longing looks. Nada. What I have been doing since I moved here.

I am going to have to grow more comfortable with that kind of dichotomy. I need to have a public face that has no sexuality involved at all. That’s going to be a change. The last 8-ish years, Noah and I were a lot more flirty and grabby and we did kiss. It felt like a reasonable thing? We always landed in no more festive than PG-13 territory.

Now that is a harder thing. My children will not see a revolving door of bodies through my bed. I was really fucked up by watching my sister cycle through terrible men. She only felt seen by people who would punch her when she was antagonistic and mean enough.

I want better patterns and trends than that. I see a woman way out in front of me. The Future Me that I’m going to be some day. That woman is one who makes Vicki proud. Noah will be proud of me too. I don’t think my parents would be proud of me. It’s ok, I have a very proud Dad in my life.

There are a lot of patterns and events in my past that I know to look for. I have seen people be poly in a lot of crappy ways. Also, good ways.

It is time to get started on the day. I want to feel less ashamed. I think that means I should be doing my talking to myself the way I used to. People who shame me for it are not good people for me to bond to. That’s ok. There are millions of reasons for people to not be compatible with me. Billions, probably. That’s ok.

I don’t need thousands of people. I don’t even need significant relationships with hundreds of people. I need dozens. This is lucky because I already have a good two or three dozen depending on how you evaluate. I need a few more because I need them to be local. I don’t need to date all of them. But I need a vibrant community.

Sobonfu told me I would never fit in anywhere–I need to build my own community. I don’t think I am going to do that in the walled garden. It means being vulnerable. I am not a fiction writer. I write because I am creating myself. I write because letting people know who I am, to as deep a degree as they choose to opt-in to, is a way of letting them know me that doesn’t involve me having to open my big fat mouth. I worry a lot about getting into one of those modes where I blurt out way more than I mean to because I am so desperate to feel connected. Writing is a way to cope with that. Writing means that I am able to be more present for just listening.

It is a way to siphon off pieces of myself so that I don’t have a bursting pressure to share them with the person in the room. I am really struggling with not having Noah to talk to about everything. It makes me wonder if there will ever again be someone who gets to see behind the curtain. It certainly isn’t the people in this house. They don’t want to read my writing. We are all very clear about that. Maybe when I die.

I’m sad and I’m scared. I’m going to like people. I’m going to spend time with them. I will always be aware of the full ocean of self I am keeping away from them with a dam I am constantly repairing. Noah didn’t like all of me and I learned ways to manage that. I will do that with more people. I will do more compartmentalising and less self-editing. I can leave parts of me out of a container. I won’t ever try to eliminate them again. I’m going to need to find ways to walk forward ethically.

I’m going to need to talk to myself. Fuck.

I need to make breakfast.

Little Monster, Big Monster

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I have been thinking about this guy who was around the San Francisco scene years ago. I’m going to call him Deep Tissue Dude because one of the ways he made friends was by giving free massages to people, mostly women. He did have professional training and he was extremely technically skilled. It wasn’t his primary job (most folks struggle to survive in the Bay Area on just a massage therapist wage) but when he was in between tech gigs he would take on some clients to fill in the gap.

I met him after I left my Owner. I was 23 and I was going to Burning Man events with folks who were slightly overlapping with the kink community in part because I was trying to find a different community group where I wouldn’t have to see my ex and partly because I was in a weird place with my self harming behavior. I don’t think that extreme promiscuity is always done from a place of self harm but I can say that my own promiscuity is sometimes done from a place of love and connection and sometimes it is based on the fact that I had a sociopathic pedophile as a father who told me I existed in the world because men need a place to put their dicks. I had been in therapy on and off for 20 years at that point but I had not yet met the therapist who really rocked my whole world and made me really make leaps and bounds of progress with my trauma.

I met this guy and he seemed pretty cool. He talked a lot about his parenting and he talked a lot about boundaries and safety and consent and just generally he was good at giving off all the “I’m a good guy–really” signals. I feel it is important to say that he was an incredibly large man; like Samoan large. He was very tall–maybe 6’3″? (That’ll be around 190cm for the rest of you.) He had a gigantic barrel chest; he was fat but that wasn’t the dominant impression he gave. He was just massive. He was careful and deliberate about how he used his size when he interacted with women, and of course he mostly interacted with women. He hung out with men approximately how much he had to in order to pass the “Oh I know him; he’s alright” bar.

He did that thing where he walked and moved with authority so people tended to knee jerk assume that he really knew what he was talking about. He would talk about bodies and anatomy to perverts and sexually adventurous people in a way that established his authority. He was trying hard to be an important someone without actually being in a position of responsibility. He talked constantly about accountability

I’ll be frank and say that at that period of time most of the people I was hanging out with were doing a lot of drugs. MDMA was the big favorite, but GHB, nitrous, and coke were around too. I got the impression that other folks were using additional drugs but I didn’t know as much about that.

So Deep Tissue Dude never explicitly said “If you have sex with me I will give you drugs” and he never said “I will give you free massages if you have sex with me”. He was super careful to never ever be blunt about things. But he would ensure a plentiful supply of drugs for people who chose to hang around him when he was at an event. Much later I talked to other women and he crossed sexual lines during the massages quite frequently and none of us ever felt like we could bring it up. He always had a “Oh I am so sorry, I was misinterpreting your signals. I thought you wanted me to.”

I feel very required to stop at this point and explicitly say that even though I am aware that what he did was sexual assault I do not carry him in my head and in my heart as someone who assaulted me. I mean, he did but it wasn’t a big assault and it never went very far. He put his finger in my cunt once. He leaned over and licked my cunt once. Those happened several months apart and after the second time I never came back for another massage.

Why did I hang out with him at all? Why didn’t I ghost him after the first “slip”? Well, frankly, because I was fucking poor and I have chronic pain issues and he gave me help to ease the pain I was in.

I’ve been thinking about him because I think about the way that he gave me very minor uncomfortable feelings fairly quickly. I noticed that his big talk about how important his kids were in his life… was accompanied by him rarely actually seeing his kids and constantly pleading poverty for why he couldn’t afford to send child support to his “evil” ex. I noticed that he had a revolving door of “super close friends” who were always women, usually women who were under 25 and coming from backgrounds of extreme trauma. I noticed that he would always loudly, verbally set boundaries in really conservative places but then he would cross them regularly and say that he didn’t actually need the boundaries to be so conservative because actually I wasn’t taking advantage of him the way “other people” did.

He did a lot of talking about all the things he was going to do, all the ways he could do cool things for people, all the classes he could teach… and in reality outside of providing drugs he wasn’t stable or consistent or a good source of anything.

For me he was a Little Monster. He did shit he shouldn’t do; things that are literally illegal and he was messy and inappropriate. I don’t feel violated and I don’t feel like a victim.

But there were women for whom he was a Big Monster. There was one girl in particular where he gave her drugs and then he raped her. She went to the police and it was a whole shit show. I don’t know if I am remembering this completely correctly (it has been almost 20 years) but I believe it didn’t get to trial. She was slut shamed into infinity and beyond and she couldn’t handle pushing hard enough to make him pay.

I actually think of that woman, who was more of a girl at the time, quite often. Sometimes people will ask me why I am as conservative as I am with some of my boundaries in my parenting and I think of this girl. Her mother was a pro-domme and active in the scene. This girl had grown up surrounded by perverts. I met her when she was 18 and she told stories about how she had been sitting on the knees of various prominent perverts naked in hot tubs since she was 16.

I think of her every single time I tell my children how to handle nudity and adults who get close to them. (For the record my kids have been to many nudist events and I don’t think naked bodies are in any way a problem or inherently sexual.) I think of her when I tell my kids to beware of people who try really really really hard to seem trustworthy.

Why do they need to try so hard?

I think of that girl when I tell parents in the scene that it’s not a good idea to carry on with your kinky life with your children present. I think of that girl when I tell parents that I don’t think co-ops for babysitting with other kinky parents are a good idea. I mean, she isn’t even the only child of kinky parents I know who has had what seemed to me to be a very brutal entry into adulthood.

Deep Tissue Dude was blacklisted from a few events. He was no longer welcome at the Burning Man parties. Last I heard he had moved to a different city and was an integral part of the scene there.

I know he sexually assaulted at least dozens of women. I am quite certain he raped many–I have no way of guessing the number.

I think of him when I interact with people and they have messy boundaries. I think of him when I interact with people who loudly state why they are an authority and credible over and over again. I think of him when someone makes big promises about all the things they are going to do for other people.

I think of her when I watch people try to figure out how to respond to Monsters both Big and Little. There is so much silencing of discourse “don’t bring drama” and minimising the experiences of people who know something isn’t right but they aren’t sure where the line was crossed.

I know lots of people who cross a line once then they don’t cross it again. I deeply respect them. I know lots of people who cross a line then they make big protestations about how they won’t do something inappropriate again… until the next time.

When my inside voice tells me that I need to stay away from someone, when I notice that someone is inconsistent with their words versus their behavior, when I notice that someone reminds me of Monsters I used to know I listen now. I feel more emboldened to talk about stupid small things that start adding up. If I have a list of 3 or 4 small things that bother me I recognise that as meaning I will not be surprised when I find out that this person, who might be a Little Monster for me, will probably, eventually be a Big Monster for someone else.

I am grateful for the fact that I am no longer in a place in my life where the company of a Little Monster is better than being alone. I have a lot of compassion for the girl I was and the reasons that I made quite a few very poor choices in friends.

Pay attention to the integrity people have around their words. People really like to tell on themselves. When someone says “Oh, I will…” all the time but they don’t actually do it don’t be surprised when they say “Oh, I will never…” and then they do it anyway.