I’ve had to spend my 20s – and most of my life – hiding parts of myself that other people didn’t like, found boring or weird, etc..
It was soul crushing.
My First Marriage Was A Mistake I Made at 21
I entered my first marriage at 21 having made a grave mistake – we didn’t discuss politics or money or anything like that beforehand, and I think my family of origin was all too happy to have me be someone else’s problem, so the engagement was brief and my mother meddled the whole way down.
I shouldn’t have been surprised when I found out that my ex husband was a Trump supporter on the first day of our honeymoon, and he found out that I wasn’t that day, as well. But that was arguably the least of our problems.
The next 21 months were a slow unraveling of the image of me he had in his head as he saw who I actually was as it progressively became harder to hide those parts of me I’d suppressed, and it broke both of us. Like….you know what happens when you light an aerosol can on fire? We broke like that. Explosively, viscerally, irreparably.
I was determined to never make that mistake again after my headmate Peri left him, but I didn’t know how…
Polyamory? More Like Communication Boot Camp
“..communication is like lube – if you think you’ve used enough, use some more. In other words, it’s better to over communicate than not tell your people enough.”
Lazarus Halliwell
Polyam has been our proving ground. It forced us to get somewhat good at communication or the whole arrangement would fall apart, to examine the power dynamics in our relationships, the role of privilege, and all of those sorts of things, and really address all of those things at the root.
I am still not a “master communicator” by any means, but I am a hell of a lot better than when my headmate and bullshit grandmaster Eight started practicing polyam in ’21. Five years in the trenches will show you a lot of what NOT to do, that’s for sure, and if I had to give y’all any kind of advice, I’d say that communication is like lube – if you think you’ve used enough, use some more. In other words, it’s better to over communicate than not tell your people enough.
The Unediting, Or Why I Stopped Self-Suppressing
And in that same vein, it has forced me to no longer hide or suppress the sides of myself I did in my first marriage. A kind of unediting of self, if you will. Because in a relationship style built on authentic communication and informed, enthusiastic consent of all parties, it would make no goddamn sense to self-suppress.
That and I’m chronically fucking ill. I am too tired for that shit.
The people who love me long term love ME. Not some edited, curated simulacrum of me that I contorted myself into presenting for them. I don’t do that for people anymore. They get the hurricane force poet, visual artist, web tinker, techno-spiritual explorer, the cranky hermit who has to be bribed to leave the house with coffee and cinnamon treats, the nocturnal tomfuckery, graphic design atrocities, and every bit of worldbuilding I’ve been doing in my head and on the page I’ve been doing for the past decade.
They get the prepper instinct, the “I don’t have an MD but I can give you a pretty decent guess as to what is wrong with you if you give me enough coffee and time, and if I’m stumped I know seven people I could call” raised by doctors chronic illness batshittery and excellence, and all the dry one liners and sarcasm and impassioned rants and rabbit holes I have to offer at 3 AM or whenever they want to know something weird or fucking awesome about European royalty or spy tradecraft or whatever the fuck I’m thinking about at that hour if they ask the right questions 😉
Turning 30, Unedited
I turn 30 next year. And of all the cool shit I’ve done, I think that takes the cake. Because this is six years in the making and it undoes 20 something years of the fuck shit before it.
I love y’all. I couldn’t have done this without you 💛
-Allēna