Herein, lies a thorough diagnosis and understanding of how I failed and sabotaged myself and the first polyamorous relationship I've been in. There is a significant chance of repeated thoughts and dialogue from the "Paused" entry.
Expectations, unbalance, silence, fear, inexperience.
From the beginning this felt different. I wrote about that in the "Diagnosis" post. My normal behaviors and moods seemed irrelevant and useless. Largely, my asexuality leaves me feeling rather cool towards romantic interests. I care for them, deeply, and love them, but it was never on the cusp of how drastic and dramatic this felt. It felt real, visceral, intense, and I felt alive. For the first time, in a long time. My normal cool, indifference, and slightly judgmental attitude changed to one of childish endearment, adoration, and blindness. Where as normally I would find faults in people and it would turn me away, here, when I found them, I just did not care.
I wrote then about my fears, "Insomnia...again", how I was terrified that the feelings I had were exclusive to one person. That I would never feel these emotions again. My greatest fear was the these intense emotions that I was feeling for the first time would go unrequited, and 3-4 months down the road I'd be broken up with due to the unbalance between our feelings. This was how my previous relationship ended, and it was quite painful to endure. I wished to avoid that at all costs.
The foundations and expectations I had built in starting this relationship were all based on my previous experiences. I went in knowing it was a poly relationship, that my partner would be seeing other people. I never once thought to change how I thought or acted in the relationship. Maintaining my old monogamous mindset undermined everything and set in motion my thought processes that lead to where I am now.
While it is easy to look at the issues after the fact, I don't blame myself too harshly. Being my first poly relationship I was unsure just what to think or how I would be stressed. While it does make sense to assume I would need to change how I thought about things, I had no idea in how or what ways I needed to.Looking at things, knowing this, it seems very obvious why the ended up the way they did. After time when distance was first created I took it personally, as a referendum on myself and the desire to have me around.
This initial doubt was planted, and led to nagging feelings of objectification and of being used. Whenever we would be physically affectionate, and follow this with a period of inactivity, I would begin to feel used as a sexual object, or as a tool/experiment to better understand how submissives work. It was untrue and irrational, but that is what fear does to you.
Instead of talking about these things, I tried to push them away with the lingering jealous/inadequate feelings in order to try and make myself more desirable to be with/around. When this also failed, the cascade of negative emotions became overwhelming, seen in "Haunted". I grasped desperately for anything I could trying to hold on to something I thought I was loosing.
Ironic that grasping may be the thing that caused me to loose it anyway.
Much in the way that struggling makes you sink in quicksand faster, or how panicking speeds up how quickly poison travels within your body, my fear exacerbated the problems.
The grasping only pushed more distance between us, which snowballed the effects into where things were stressed into breaking. Tension, stress, hostility, and pain were brought in and pushed us away from each other.
The rest is as you can imagine, there are details left out here that are covered in previous entries, "On Being Punished", but I want to minimize the amount of rehashing.
So realizing this now, I'm beating somewhat of a dead horse as I rehash much of what was written in "Paused". I can't force anyone's feelings, and I shouldn't be trying to force my own. I hate the feeling of regressing. The self deception and self degradation that comes after a split up wherein a person doesn't want to hurt or think of the partner anymore, and thus beats themselves up when they do. I'm trying hard not to follow down that path. I'm attempting to remain optimistic and fatalistic in that if things are meant to work out then they will. I'm going to let my emotions run their own path. If that means I wake up and fall asleep thinking about someone for months on end then so be it. I'm focusing on the positive emotions, and the love that I still have, even if it is unshared now. I'm done hiding from things.
Being drowned by love is a new experience for me, and one that overwhelmed me and my healthy obsession with being honest to myself. Fear and insecurity hit me like never before, and I don't like what it did to me. In as such, I am working to confront these issues head on and move beyond them.
I made an oath in 2008 that I was done lying to myself. I have sense then taken a crusade of positive change and personal growth that has led me here. There have been setbacks on the way, and hurtful things have been said about my commitment to that crusade recently. I understand how and why the accusations were made, I disagree with them, but they were made for a reason.
I've recently thought about adding to my tattoo to reemphasize this point to myself. My relationship to the art has often been representative of my sense of self and my journey. I had thought to add birds flying near/perched on hir, but now I think I'm wanting a dramatic explosion of color and life coming from the flower on it's right side. Symbolizing the growth through circumstance and positive change. Beauty out of the stone cold death that was my past life. The hiding, self mutilation, and emotional violence towards others that were so much a part of who I was. It is there, it will always be there, a part of my history. It is no longer who I am though, and in pushing out of that shell, the cracks that formed, and the life that has come back into me I feel are being left unrepresented. I shall ponder this, and just what and how I want to express this.
Expectations, unbalance, silence, fear, inexperience.
From the beginning this felt different. I wrote about that in the "Diagnosis" post. My normal behaviors and moods seemed irrelevant and useless. Largely, my asexuality leaves me feeling rather cool towards romantic interests. I care for them, deeply, and love them, but it was never on the cusp of how drastic and dramatic this felt. It felt real, visceral, intense, and I felt alive. For the first time, in a long time. My normal cool, indifference, and slightly judgmental attitude changed to one of childish endearment, adoration, and blindness. Where as normally I would find faults in people and it would turn me away, here, when I found them, I just did not care.
I wrote then about my fears, "Insomnia...again", how I was terrified that the feelings I had were exclusive to one person. That I would never feel these emotions again. My greatest fear was the these intense emotions that I was feeling for the first time would go unrequited, and 3-4 months down the road I'd be broken up with due to the unbalance between our feelings. This was how my previous relationship ended, and it was quite painful to endure. I wished to avoid that at all costs.
The foundations and expectations I had built in starting this relationship were all based on my previous experiences. I went in knowing it was a poly relationship, that my partner would be seeing other people. I never once thought to change how I thought or acted in the relationship. Maintaining my old monogamous mindset undermined everything and set in motion my thought processes that lead to where I am now.
While it is easy to look at the issues after the fact, I don't blame myself too harshly. Being my first poly relationship I was unsure just what to think or how I would be stressed. While it does make sense to assume I would need to change how I thought about things, I had no idea in how or what ways I needed to.Looking at things, knowing this, it seems very obvious why the ended up the way they did. After time when distance was first created I took it personally, as a referendum on myself and the desire to have me around.
This initial doubt was planted, and led to nagging feelings of objectification and of being used. Whenever we would be physically affectionate, and follow this with a period of inactivity, I would begin to feel used as a sexual object, or as a tool/experiment to better understand how submissives work. It was untrue and irrational, but that is what fear does to you.
Instead of talking about these things, I tried to push them away with the lingering jealous/inadequate feelings in order to try and make myself more desirable to be with/around. When this also failed, the cascade of negative emotions became overwhelming, seen in "Haunted". I grasped desperately for anything I could trying to hold on to something I thought I was loosing.
Ironic that grasping may be the thing that caused me to loose it anyway.
Much in the way that struggling makes you sink in quicksand faster, or how panicking speeds up how quickly poison travels within your body, my fear exacerbated the problems.
The grasping only pushed more distance between us, which snowballed the effects into where things were stressed into breaking. Tension, stress, hostility, and pain were brought in and pushed us away from each other.
The rest is as you can imagine, there are details left out here that are covered in previous entries, "On Being Punished", but I want to minimize the amount of rehashing.
So realizing this now, I'm beating somewhat of a dead horse as I rehash much of what was written in "Paused". I can't force anyone's feelings, and I shouldn't be trying to force my own. I hate the feeling of regressing. The self deception and self degradation that comes after a split up wherein a person doesn't want to hurt or think of the partner anymore, and thus beats themselves up when they do. I'm trying hard not to follow down that path. I'm attempting to remain optimistic and fatalistic in that if things are meant to work out then they will. I'm going to let my emotions run their own path. If that means I wake up and fall asleep thinking about someone for months on end then so be it. I'm focusing on the positive emotions, and the love that I still have, even if it is unshared now. I'm done hiding from things.
Being drowned by love is a new experience for me, and one that overwhelmed me and my healthy obsession with being honest to myself. Fear and insecurity hit me like never before, and I don't like what it did to me. In as such, I am working to confront these issues head on and move beyond them.
I made an oath in 2008 that I was done lying to myself. I have sense then taken a crusade of positive change and personal growth that has led me here. There have been setbacks on the way, and hurtful things have been said about my commitment to that crusade recently. I understand how and why the accusations were made, I disagree with them, but they were made for a reason.
I've recently thought about adding to my tattoo to reemphasize this point to myself. My relationship to the art has often been representative of my sense of self and my journey. I had thought to add birds flying near/perched on hir, but now I think I'm wanting a dramatic explosion of color and life coming from the flower on it's right side. Symbolizing the growth through circumstance and positive change. Beauty out of the stone cold death that was my past life. The hiding, self mutilation, and emotional violence towards others that were so much a part of who I was. It is there, it will always be there, a part of my history. It is no longer who I am though, and in pushing out of that shell, the cracks that formed, and the life that has come back into me I feel are being left unrepresented. I shall ponder this, and just what and how I want to express this.
