some more honesty

that honest meme has been going around, and i’ve been tagged more than once, so i’m just going to let loose a little more:

• i just barely rescued yet another pot of oatmeal from burning to a crisp on the stovetop.  i often try to burn the house down via unattended pots of oatmeal when i’m stressed.  to reward myself for not burning it, i grated an apple into it, added a dash of cinnamon, and am now eating it.  it kind of tastes like apple crisp.  good crisp, not bad crisp.  get it?
• had a little tiny panic attack while driving home from school today.  remember:  must be very very careful driving when stressed.  big impairment folks.  like sleep deprivation or drinking.
• you know you’ve had a bad week when most of the dirty dishes are either teacups or dishes used to feed the cats.
• speaking of cats, they are very sensitive to us being stressed.  i can see the changes in their behavior.  i feel bad that they have to live with us.  but i’m trying very hard to be extra good to them.
• my teeth ache from clenching them so much
• i appreciate a lot (so so so much) the supportive emails & comments coming my way.  thanks all.
• i was talking with a very dear & trusted friend last night  and said something like, ‘as hard as this is, i think maybe this is the missing link — finally we can figure out the root problem that has been so difficult this whole time’ and ze laughed out loud.  and said ‘no, there is never a final piece.  maybe a crucial piece — maybe a really big part of it — but not final.  you can’t expect that.’  and as true as i recognize that statement to be, part of me desperately wants to cling to the thinking no it’s really this and once it’s sorted we’ll be just fine forever and ever.  i don’t see myself as one who usually clings to fantasies — brutally honest is one way i’ve been known to characterize myself — but this time it’s so big and difficult that i’m struggling.
• i feel bad about my last post.  once again i feel like i was reacting to a very real thing in my life, but one that has just become totally irrelevant due to the revelation of yet more (& worse) trauma on M.’s part.  what i want to know is:  where the hell are the support groups for partners?  of just about anyone?  i feel a need to explore this — partners suffer a lot.  as much as anyone except maybe the original sufferer (of whatever trauma, not important what exactly).
• i feel bad when i say things like ‘i’m struggling’ and ‘i’m stressed’ because i think it will make M feel even worse, or guilty for making me feel bad.  i battle against this because i understand that denying my own feelings will not ultimately help.  i guess that’s where you all come in.  please keep reminding me that it’s okay to feel bad, that i am not overreacting.
• thanks again for being out there.

left behind

this post has been writing itself in my head for a while now.  i feel as though it’s a hard topic to get into, one that doesn’t get much air time.  perhaps i’m overly sensitive, self-indulgent, or just weak.  i’m spraying vulnerability all over the place these days.

M. had a really big thing happen back in february/march of 2008:  she admitted that she’s always been more male than female.  or more masculine than feminine.  along with that, she acknowledged that the intense homophobia and sexual shame that she was brought up with had shaped her relationship not only with the world and herself but also with me.

this event had a profound effect on our relationship.  everything got a lot easier.  she went from barely functional to someone who could interact with other people successfully.  from someone whose relationship with the world was something that fell to me to manage to someone who could go out shopping on their own.  someone who could leave the house without spending half an hour working up the nerve to go.  M needed me less, and I loved it.  she also had more confidence, more charisma, more strength.  it was like she awoke from a long, drug-induced semi-coma.

all of this is good news.  though along with this came a cascade of realizations of the trauma of her past, the messages she received about how to be a good person, the extent of the emotional abuse that her family visited on her.  this all took an amazing amount of time to process, work through, deal with, get over.  of course one doesn’t really get over this kind of thing at all, but one eventually tries to make peace with it, accept it as part of your story.

now i’ve written almost 300 words, and am i talking about myself?  no.  look back over the archives of this blog.  how much do i really say about myself, compared with how much i talk about M. and/or our relationship?  well, you say, it’s not bad.  you describe a lot about yourself (maybe too much), we feel like we know you.

yes.

i started this blog to talk about myself, perhaps to help me find myself.  to put things out there and get feedback.  to process perhaps.

but as much as i talk about myself here, it is almost a constant struggle not to talk about M.  it often feels like the most significant, defining characteristics of my life are M.’s trauma, and the effect that it has had on her, and beyond that, the effect it has had on me and our relationship.

so what?

i want to say that i wonder if this is a common phenomenon.  what happens to you when your partner transitions?  or semi-transitions, as in my case?  who pays attention to you?  who processes your trauma, after you’re done mopping up the mess that your partner sprayed all over you?  when you deal with things over and over that surely would be better dealt with in therapy?  at least a therapist would give you a second opinion sometimes?

i certainly don’t think this problem is unique to partners of trans and mostly-trans people.  this is surely difficult for partners of people who survive sexual abuse or other serious trauma.  partners of veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder.  partners of people with genuine mental illness, such as chronic depression or schizophrenia.  i have some experience living with someone who is ‘clinically depressed’, as those of you who read this post might remember.

the damage done to the people who share lives and households with these problems is not insignificant.  we need help and support too, perhaps more than you might think.  more than a year after this revelation event, i’m still a mess.  my life was on hold for many years.  i made decisions that were meant to compensate for the very real problems suffered by my spouse, not that were meant to fulfil my own needs.  i have compromised many of my own desires and dreams to be there for her.  i don’t doubt that she can say the same thing, and a certain amount of this is necessary in any relationship.  but i think that i’ve maybe done more than my share, when all is said and done.

and now?  we look great.  everything is fine.  M. is very good-looking, as it turns out.  smart, charming, and very successful.  girls flirt with her.  she has the glamour of heroism – tough, trauma-suffering butch, but with a heart of gold.  helpful and considerate with a healthy dose of ‘don’t mess with me’ toppy energy.  no wonder she’s popular, i certainly think she’s hot stuff.

but i find myself bitten by a certain jealous bug sometimes.  here we have someone who not long ago couldn’t really function, who was so miserable and isolated it would really, really surprise people who have only just met her.  i’m sure i seem very nice too, a faithful old-school femme spouse who clearly stands by her man and cooks an excellent dinner.

but where is my drama?  when is my heroism going to be recognized?  sometimes i feel like M. gets this kind of respect, this ‘oh i see you’ve been in the trenches’ kind of attitude.  no one looks at me like that.  my accomplishments for years centered around making things possible for M.  no one now even recognizes that it was necessary – now she’s fine.  the people who would recognize/remember that i did this superhuman feat are the same people who are vaguely disgusted by M. now, hence the end of our so-called ‘friendships’ with them.  not exactly the place i want to go looking for support.

and then there’s the issue of my interpretation, and issues of guilt:  all this that i did, one could argue, only perpetuated the conditions where M. could lose herself, give up on herself, slip into this semi-coma.  after all, i was there taking care of things.  if i had let go, or done it less well, maybe this whole event could have happened years sooner.  how do i deal with that potential guilt?  and how do i figure out whether or not i have a leg to stand on when feeling this bitterness?  should i get over it?  because it makes me feel like a selfish beast.

i would surely like to get over it.  the governing principle of my life, that i return to over and over, is that of fairness.  i want justice.  this causes great conflict for me on this particular topic, for one interpretation says that i deserve justice and recognition for my immense sacrifice, and the other interpretation says that i should apologize for enabling this disfunctionality, and celebrate this emergence as semi-trans wholeheartedly.  which of course i do.  but sometimes i feel overwhelmed by the drama.  sometimes i want to have my own drama.  just as i sometimes wish i were more visible, and can’t seem to do anything about it.  

when i look back over this year and a half, i see a few things.  many, many successes.  but with them, a constant underlying theme, is one of personal isolation for myself.  i realized recently that i chickened out of calling an old friend this summer because i didn’t want to deal with explaining M. to her.  i have gained 15 pounds.  i still hear myself repeating old complaints, some from after M.’s revelation, some from before.  what on the surface seemed like liberation at the beginning seems like only partial liberation now.

and i struggle with the tendency to embrace the reality that is my life and make it work, instead of insisting on my own transformation.  i made that mistake over and over and over in my twenties, and am horrified to see myself trying to slip back into that pattern.  i’m not entirely happy with how my life is going.  i want to be free on a fundamental soul level.  i want to be free of the old habits of self-constraint that i learned in order to be a good partner to someone who was deeply in denial of her homophobia and on some level deeply afraid of sex. 

and i struggle constantly with the feeling that if i complain about any of this, if i even tell it to someone else (much less the internet, my god) i am being disloyal, ungrateful, spiteful even.  i bet M. would say if i asked her now, ‘you can write about anything you want.  it’s your blog, it’s your life.’  and i recognize that, and appreciate it, and that’s why i’m writing this and letting you all read it.  but it still feels like a betrayal.

the betrayal is not, i suppose, letting you all read it.  the betrayal is thinking/feeling it at all.

so really, i have no conclusions.  this started out as a more general post, about what happens to the partners of people who go through transition, about how we get lost in the drama and sidelined or left behind.  pushed always to the background, even as we would die to protect our loved one.  but it turned into a personal catalogue of frustration and paralysis, a picture of my inability to move forward.

go to town, people, until i get scared and take this post down.

laboring

I’m having a hard-ish time, folks.  M. and I have been having what I have been calling ‘a rough summer’.  I’m not really sure what exactly that means, and it means different things at different times.  Anyone who’s read back in the archives knows that this relationship is really old, and really old relationships have a lot of history.  A lot of our history is really hard to take.  We have had so many misunderstandings, decisions made on the basis of wrong impressions.  Where one person said something and the other took it as some sort of larger truth, where really it was just where they were that day.  And sometimes the impression that one person gets really is where the other person is, but either or both of us conveniently forget because it’s too difficult to deal with.

And then there’s progress.  We’ve made a lot of progress over this year+ after M. came out as trans.  We communicate better.  We have better sex.  We have friends and a social life.  

But that can also be a source of stress. One thing that used to be really hard was M.’s social anxiety.  There basically was no situation where there would be anyone but me where M. could be comfortable, hence she didn’t ever want to be in those situations, hence we didn’t have friends.  I stayed home because if I didn’t she worried obsessively the whole time I was gone.  Those days are over, thank god, but there’s still a fairly high level of social anxiety, that mostly stems from the reality that people are not so welcoming to the butch who is male/masculine in everything but body and pronouns.  They just aren’t.  And having spent a lot of time analysing what went wrong with our past ‘friendships’ (that were really not friendships, but were the closest thing we had), we are good at recognizing the sliding-eyes-past-you-thing that straight and gay people do when they just don’t want to interact with this trans person problem.

When we came back from the UK, we looked to everyone here like a really nice butch/femme couple who liked to go out and see shows, who knew a lot about gender theory and queer issues.  We integrated really nicely into the queer scene here in Boston.  But the reality is that we are still really struggling with our history of social isolation.  Both with each other and with social interaction.  We realized recently that our former ‘friendships’ were a bit abusive, with people who didn’t actually like us, but liked what we represented for them in their lives, and liked to hang out with us because it made them feel bigger/cooler/better.  That sucks, and it led to a lot of fights where M. would say she didn’t want to go to things and I would insist because I was so desperate for friends, even while admitting (to myself but not really to her) that they weren’t that much fun.  Although in my defense at that point I had given up on things ever being fun again, and was trying to maintain a functionality that I thought was necessary to living life at all.  Which I realize isn’t really a defense at all, just sad.

But I think a lot of our new friends have no idea that they are dealing with social slow learners.  Our profound isolation means that other people have shared experience, culturally, socially — that we don’t have.  As an example, by our age, if you’re going to be involved in the queer kink scene, you’ve probably already done it.  And since we came on the social scene already equipped with the language to talk about it, it’s automatically assumed that we know everything we need to know.

It sort of reminds me of when I was a junior in high school:  one of my classmates, the really cool surfer dude who did drugs and partied hard, looked at me in class one day and said, “I want to know where [myname] parties.  I bet you party in Boston.”  He had assumed that I had some rocking social life that was outside of his experience.  How else to explain my air of superiority, my knowledge of culture and coolness, and my apparent lack of ever talking to anyone?  I got really good at reading things and eavesdropping on other people’s conversations, filing cultural references away, so I would know what people were talking about.  Except that I never actually did the drugs, or listened to the bands, or watched the tv shows, or shopped at the stores.  I am constantly caught out now, where someone will be talking about a band and I’ll know all about them but not be able to recognize a single song that they play.

Long tangent, meant to illustrate that this is not new to me, but I have no idea how to get over it.  There are people I’d like to be better friends with.  I don’t know how to make that happen.  Especially in the context of the relationship I’m in, and the very real difficulty that M. has in these situations.  I deal well with crowds and messy noise, and enjoy meeting people in that kind of situation.  I like the sensation of losing myself.  M. doesn’t.  For very understandable reasons.  But I don’t know how to deal with this difference, because it makes me feel guilty, like if I bring her to an event like that and have a good time while she’s not, I am being insensitive and selfish.  

And I don’t know how to balance my desire to be out there meeting new people and pushing my boundaries with M.’s very different experience in these social situations.  I feel guilty for suggesting that I go without her, because it seems mean to say “I’m going out, see you at 2am!”.  At the same time, these situations can sometimes make M. even more stressed because she knows I’m enjoying myself, so her lack of enjoyment seems that much worse to her, and she knows that I want to be out there and pushing my boundaries but she’s unable to facilitate or support that.  So it’s a bit of a vicious cycle.  

We have talked a lot about what we want our lives to look like in 10 years.  We agree that stepping off the career ladder/upwardly mobile rat race is deeply appealing and important to both of us.  I see people’s pictures on f@cebook (which is the devil) and they spend their summers at the beach, cuddling with a pile of hot tattooed queers, and they all look really comfortable.  That’s what I want my life to look like.  Not the American Dream corporate job + white picket fence + environmentally aware car life that I was heading towards two years ago.  But how to make it happen?  It’s hard to jump the tracks once you’re on them, and I haven’t found the right signal to switch yet.  

I guess like everything it is a work in progress.  If you made it this far, thanks for reading.

honest scrap since i was tagged

and since it was my esteemed spouse, i feel obliged…there were rules but i can’t be bothered.  not feeling the rules thing right now.

here’s 10 honest things about me.   i’ll try to make it things none of you know about me.  i generally don’t tag people, so feel free to do this if you like.  i don’t care.

1.  when i was a kid, my mom called me ‘t-da-rex’ which has a similar sound to my real name, and reflects her opinion that i am a cruel heartless beast with ruthless killing power.  i was always kind of hurt that she thought that, but also secretly pleased that i had such an effect on people.  i sort of like being scary.  however, i’d like to second greg by saying that jurassic park was the SCARIEST movie i ever, ever saw.  it was made worse by the fact that the little girl looked a lot like i did as a kid.  wicked.

2.  i’ve physically been in 35 states and 11 countries.

3.  i am commuting by car for the first time in five years.  not since 2004, when i worked at a weird fabric store in RI for two months.  where i was paid in cash, $7/hour.  and you think you’ve had bad jobs.  one of my co-workers was fired (after i quit) for stealing polar fleece.  you can’t make this stuff up.

4.  while we’re on the subject of cars, my last commute (that to the fabric store) never required me to shift higher than third gear.  my current commute gets me up to fourth.  i’m living high now!  yay 35 mph!

5.  i’m going to cut my hair off again, but this time i’m going to a salon.  this decision seems to be widely supported but deep down i feel a little cowardly.  i feel like i should just cut it off myself.

6.  i recently proved my survival skill prowess in a class exercise the other day, where i largely agreed with a panel of experts about which tools are vital for survival in sub-arctic conditions.  i’ve always maintained that growing up with a closet survivalist (my mom, different post) means that you really want to be my friend when the apocalypse arrives.  i bet i get all sorts of new spam from this post…

7.  i had no vacation this summer.  none at all.  i’m trying to incorporate vacation-esque activities into the fall.

8.  i’m really happy right now for no reason at all.  maybe it’s because i’m on the internet.  hi everyone!  look!  i’m on the internet!  okay i’ll stop now.

9.  i spent some of my (scarce) free time this summer learning how to fix my bike.  it’s all ready to ride now, just in time for fall!  anyone want to ride with me?

10.  the fall is my favorite time of year.  okay i think you all knew that already (like those of you who read my blog last year) but i’m running out of things to say.  if every day were like a crisp, new england fall day, i would maybe die of happiness.  so maybe it’s just as well.  but at least i’d die happy…in spite of all this talk of death #8 is really true, i swear.

okay, did i miss anything?