#void-avatar

I remember there was a moment when the grand epiphany settled on me. I remember being like:

I don’t remember exactly what it was that made me realize. Honestly, I think it was a download. But afterward, more and more pieces started fitting together, and when I could finally see the image it was creating, all I could do was laugh at how I didn’t realize it sooner. All I could do was be in awe of how deeply I’d repressed this part of myself.

M and I had been considering pursuing a non-mono type of situation for a while. There was a period of a year or two during which I dealt with lingering health problems, deep depression, and festering sexual trauma. We were suffering together in different ways. I’d suggested we try it, and it took him about a year to come around and decide he wanted to go for it. And so, at the time when we first started being non-mono last fall, it felt like it was something I was allowing him to do because it was something he needed. And that there was an added bonus for me, which was finally being able to be gay and explore relationships with women. 

But that didn’t quite sit right with me. I wasn’t giving him his freedom, because his freedom isn’t mine to give. And the idea that I was getting a little consolation prize rubbed me the wrong way, too. Then it dawned on me - it’s autonomy we’re talking about. It’s agency. And we both have it, and we both have a right to exercise it. This was something we both needed. It wasn’t a gift we were giving each other, because that insinuates there’s the option to rescind that gift. We were deciding to be who we were. 

And then I started remembering all the times I’d pictured him having sex with someone else, and just… not really being fazed by it at worst, and really enjoying the thought at best. And all the characters and plots I’d created on VF in which there was at least some kind of “alternative” relationship style happening. And all the daydreams I had, during which I allowed myself to indulge that part of myself. 

Thinking further back, all of my past relationships had something in common (and it wasn’t that they all ended lol). It was that, even though at one point I was happy with who I was with, I was reluctant to have to give up interacting with others in a way that was deemed “inappropriate” by society at large. I resented the idea that I couldn’t have meaningful, emotionally impactful friendships with people who were men. I resented the idea that I couldn’t even occupy the same room as a man I wasn’t dating without people ~assuming things~. I wasn’t allowed to flirt with or kiss a good-looking person, even just for a minute or two in absolute good faith, and I didn’t like that. I’d even avoided relationships with people (despite being serially unable to cope with being single) because, even though we might have been good for each other in some ways, I knew they couldn’t fulfill certain needs for me, and I didn’t realize that multiple people filling multiple needs was an option.

M fulfills so much of what I need (and our relationship is far more healthy and… fulfilling than my previous ones), so at this point, there’s not a whole lot I need that I would get from another man. (There’s a lot I need from women that he can’t provide, but that’s a whole other thing lol.) But now I know I have the autonomy and agency to talk to whoever the hell I want, however the hell I want. We both know we’d never do anything unscrupulous or untoward. We would never, ever make each other feel cheated on or insecure. And so just... getting to have autonomy and agency, and getting to do life together with my absolute soulmate and the love of my life?

January

I got married.

It was, without contest, the absolute best day of my life. I’ve known since I was real little that I wanted to be married, that I wanted to be loved the way M loves me and to love someone just as much. I don’t know how to explain the feeling of having achieved that, and being able to share that with my entire circle. @abyssalsun​ made it down!! (my only regret is that @ladyoriza​ couldn’t make it, but I’m still so glad we got to make it to theirs). As often as I can, I revisit the memory of going to @chromecutie​’s house afterward, thinking it’d just be the four of us there, and opening the door to find a whole impromptu surprise party happening. Everyone cheered for us when we came in. I played CAH with Mordred, my brother and his wife, and several friends from out of town. By all accounts, these people would never have been in the same room together, but they were, and it was transcendent. It’s been almost a year, and I still haven’t recovered from all the planning and stress; but now that I’m past it, I can say with relief that it was 100% worth it.

February

We bought a house.

Up until this point, I’d been planning a wedding, participating in house-buying stuff as best I could, interviewing for a job I ended up not taking, and dealing with life-long mental illness that was festering and reaching critical mass. But then stuff started wrapping up. The wedding happened. The house was ours. We moved in. I could finally fucking breathe. LMAO bitch you thought.

March

The pandemic reached us.

I guess by this point it had probably already been in the US for a couple months, idr. But it wasn’t until March that things really started happening. People started dying in droves. New cases spread like wildfire. I remember thinking that this would be the zombie apocalypse, because at this point, I don’t think the CDC knew much about the virus. In my anxious mind, that was a completely reasonable assumption. My boss had us all start working from home. We all thought it’d be just a couple weeks.

April

I settled into working from home.

It didn’t take me long to get used to it, maybe a week. I hadn’t yet gotten used to my new hour-long commute from the new house to work, and so working from home quickly became my new normal. But I didn’t know yet why working from home was so good for me. All I knew was that I now had the brain-space to process things. I had the energy to do yoga and cook and do hobbies, and the time to appreciate and care for the home I lived in. I could think more clearly because there was no one else around to distract me. There was sunlight I could bask in. I felt human for once, and that became vitally important and infinitely valuable to me. Despite that, I still struggled with extreme anxiety, panic attacks, and some of the worst depression I’ve suffered through since I was a teenager. Outside my house, everything was a fucking mess and no one had their shit together.

May

I went back to the office for a few weeks.

There was a lull in pandemic activity. My boss had us all start coming back to the office again. At this point, I couldn’t make heads or tails of reality anymore. Everything was changing, nothing was stable. I desperately needed to stay working from home, because that was the one thing that felt Good and Right, but I had no real argument other than, 'I just need to.' So imagine me, at this point a soggy, run-over sloppy joe, attempting to return to normal. As you might think, it was... bad. I cried and hurt all the time. I think I really freaked out my boss with the way I reacted to coming back to the office. But then the second wave hit, and we all went back to working from home again.

June

Uncle Mike died on the first day of the month.

My uncle had been sick for a while, but no one was expecting him to die so suddenly. None of us were ready for it.

I also died that day.

It might sound dramatic, but I mean it quite literally and honestly. Over the years, I had gained suspicion that I was on the autism spectrum. M graciously found me a psychiatrist that took my insurance (and happened to be right next door). I wasn’t even going in for that - I was seeking treatment for my anxiety and depression. But I had amassed a (very long) list of my symptoms, and I brought it with me and read it to my doctor. I wasn’t even a quarter of the way through the list when he stopped me. I’m paraphrasing here, but in effect, he said, “No, yeah, you’re definitely autistic.”

I remember the way my body felt. Like someone had detonated a bundle of TNT in my chest, and I was burning from the inside out. At the time, I didn’t realize this emotional immolation was purposeful and executed by the universe to get rid of this old structure and build a newer, better, stronger one. For about fifteen seconds after he said that, I was relieved that it had been that easy, that there was an explanation for everything that my ADHD didn’t explain. It made a ton of sense why my environment was so important to me. And then I felt something unnameable. It was obvious to my doctor that I was autistic. Had it been obvious to everyone else? Why hadn’t it been obvious to me? I read the rest of my symptoms to him in a daze. I don’t remember how the rest of the appointment went.

And then I burned quietly and ungracefully until I was a pile of ashes. I didn’t know this at the time, but apparently it’s common for newly-diagnosed autistic people to have such dramatic and painful reactions, especially if they weren’t well-informed on the condition. Which I wasn’t.

I started therapy.

I also started learning about my “flavor” of autism. It was arduous, embarrassing, isolating, and ugly. I became aware that I had been masking my whole life, and I was astounded by just how often I did so. What really crushed me was knowing that I’d always have to mask to protect myself. I also became hyper-aware of the things that made me Feel Bad. Inexplicably, I stopped being able to react to those things the way I used to. Previously, if something made a loud and unexpected sound, I would suppress my reaction, because it’s not cool to get mad about it. But I found I couldn’t do that anymore. I had no choice but to react the way I needed to react. I realize now that this was to make me aware of what things make me feel a certain way so I can either avoid them or learn better tools to deal with them.

The therapist I saw wasn’t specialized in autism, and she wasn’t any help in that area, but she did teach me some important things. Like, “Is it reasonable for me to feel ____?”

July

Black hole.

I don’t remember a whole lot from this month, except sifting my own ashes through my fingers and crying. Every day brought a new revelation, a new thing that clicked. All of it was helpful and very painful. My psychiatrist recommended medication, but I’d had a bad and long-lasting experience with medication as a teenager, so I suffered through the pain on my own.

I shouldn’t have. I got so low I didn’t want to be alive anymore. But I think it took reaching the bottom and feeling that much pain for me to get over my fear of pharmaceuticals. 

I got into astrology.

I had been interested in it for most of my life, but it wasn’t until this point that I started studying it in depth. I discovered it was a language that I could use to translate so many things about my own life that I didn’t understand. It was a rulebook in a time when I desperately needed rules - but one just flexible enough that it taught me how to stop thinking in binary.

August

I got medicated.

There was a big adjustment period, of course. It didn’t cure me. But it did start to make things easier. And it helped to know that, even if I didn’t believe it at the time, I deserved to rest. I deserved not to feel so much emotional pain all the time.

I turned 30.

It was easily the second best day of my life. I learned a lot of important things, like that it’s important to be present, that I’m seen and loved (just the way I am!!), and that I deserve good things. M planned a whole day of surprises:

I woke up at my leisure and we had coffee on the couch. He got me a cute card with one of our inside jokes inside - I still have it.

We went to our favorite combination lunch place and bakery, which I believe was our first real outing since the pandemic started.

We stopped by a tattoo place. I almost got a tattoo.

He set me loose in Texas Art Supply.

We got dim sum for dinner.

We had a lovely virtual cocktail hour with @chromecutie.

He bought me an ipad!!

I became Spiritual™.

I had been agnostic for the past decade or so, slowly and subtly slipping into nihilism, without realizing how detrimental those ideas were to me. I’m not sure what I thought spirituality was before, but I wasn’t into it. I had always rolled my eyes at people who talked about “a higher power”, auras, and spirit guides, until I became that person.

My psychiatrist introduced some powerful ideas to me, ones that meshed well with my previously-existing idea of how the universe worked. I won’t get into details here. That’s a whole other post. Ask me though - I’d love to talk about it.

Anyway, I started (intermittently) meditating. I learned some exceptionally powerful stuff. I felt my scaffolding being erected.

September

I started learning who I am and why I am this way.

I started seeing a new therapist. She thinks like me. She follows my erratic, forking trains of thought. She sees me and offers real, actionable feedback and solutions. Working with her, I’ve gained the ability to see my life from a 30,000-foot view. I can see now why I’ve felt so lonely my whole life. I understand how my family’s dysfunction has shaped me. I know now that I have the opposite of a victim complex - by default, I believe I am so awful that I feel sorry for everyone who has to deal with me. Because that’s what I was taught to believe. Learning that I deserve to take up space, set boundaries, say no, and be wrong sometimes is still a hard lesson for me. But most days, I believe it now. It takes other people believing it and convincing me. I still need that reassurance often.

My parents sold my childhood home.

Mentally, emotionally, I still lived there. I was still the inverted victim, still beholden to my stepdad’s whims and my mom’s complete cognitive dissonance. This was a blinking neon sign from the universe that it was time to move out. My mom told me when the closing date was so I’d have time to drive down and look at the house one last time. I didn’t go, and I still don’t regret it.

I started learning my boundaries.

After my spiritual move-out, I learned I don’t have to jump when my stepdad holds out the little circus hoop. When he otherwise shows zero interest in my life but still baits me with passive-aggressive texts, I don’t have to answer!! What a concept! I don’t have to feel guilty for not talking to my mom more than I do. We have very little in common, and I still have a lot of things to work through regarding her.

I learned how not to be so reactive.

Or rather, I’m still learning. Something else I learned in therapy is that over the course of my life, I’ve developed a desperate need to defend myself and to justify every action or thought I have, even to myself. It’d been especially troubling at work. My RSD led me to felt stupid, incompetent, and unseen daily; if my boss complimented someone, I believed it also meant he thought I was stupid and bad and wrong, otherwise he would have complimented me too. If my boss said something that even remotely sounded like I’d done something wrong, I’d race to build an impenetrable defense: “This is the reason I did that. Here’s my line of thinking. Do you understand? Can you please understand?”

Now I know that so little of what everything everyone says or does at work is about me. I can appreciate a coworker’s accomplishment and also realize it doesn’t take away anything from me. I’m not stupid or incompetent, and I’m a valuable part of the team. A lot of times, my boss and I are on two different wavelengths - that’s because I think a lot faster, which can be frustrating for him sometimes. He doesn’t fully understand me, but that doesn’t mean I’m doing anything wrong.

October

I let go of an old friend.

This was especially hard, because I had known this person for years. We’d gone through a lot together, and we’d shared some really important and emotional story plots and characters. I had agonized over whether I was truly important to her or not. It didn’t matter how much I loved her as a friend, or how badly I wanted us to be close again and remain close. I had learned to read the universe’s signs, and it was clear it was time to move on.

November

The election happened.

I was expecting things to turn out badly, but I still hoped for something good. And then something good did happen. I cried watching Harris’ speech. I felt a tenuous hope that things might finally start looking up, societally. I still haven’t really let myself fully embrace that hope, but every time I see a court shoot down another lawsuit, or hear about trump’s own conservative republican supporters tell him, “Okay, buddy, it’s time to step down,” I feel a little better. 

M and I went non-monogamous.

There’s so much I want to say about this, but it’s for another post. Suffice it to say that like every other experience this year, it has been unexpectedly challenging and ultimately a catalyst for  priceless growth. I’m unfathomably grateful that we’re doing this together, for the things we’ve learned so far, and for how much closer this experience has made us, even when I didn’t think we could get any closer. 

Turns out I’m not gray-ace.

I had identified as such for a couple years, which was why we wanted to try non-monogamy in the first place. On the surface, it perfectly explained my sexual personality. But every time I told someone my identity, I felt inexplicably sad. When I read about others having “normal” sex drives and “normal” relations with their spouses, I felt jealous.

Turns out I’m just traumatized, lol. Walking along this non-mono path has unearthed a lot of things, including this gem.

December

This was our first married christmas in our new house.

One of the handful of good things the pandemic has done for me was allowing me to back up my boundaries with hard evidence. It’s been difficult dealing with my stepdad bullying me about not coming over for thanksgiving, and having my mom subtly guilt me into making plans for next year already. But what I needed this year was a quiet holiday, instead of the usual weeks-long chaos, and I got it. And it was fucking delightful. I’ve dreamed of days exactly like that one - spending a tranquil morning with my spouse, sipping coffee and listening to music and eating treats. Deciding exactly how we want our holidays to be, because we deserve to.

After my purposeful implosion and subsequent burning down this past summer, I felt lonelier than I’d ever felt in my life. Not only did it feel like there was no one else in the world who understood what I was going through, but I also had lost my entire identity. I sifted frantically through my own ashes looking for something familiar - a semblance of my own self - and found nothing. 

My psychiatrist had mentioned meditating during one of our sessions. I thought it was fucking stupid and impossible for someone with a neurodivergent brain like mine; but I was desperate, untethered, and floating away, so when I got home, I looked up a meditation video to try. The very first one in the list of results was something like, “Meditation: Meet Your Spirit Guide.”

That sounded nice. I tried it.

It was the first time I’d ever meditated, and the process itself was so very much the opposite of what I was expecting, in a good way. I’ll save the details for another post.

The voice in the video guided me down a stairwell. In my mind, I saw it - smooth cement stairs, spiraling along a column plunged deep into the earth, lit along the sides with benevolent little lights. As the voice counted down from ten, I descended the stairs until I came to a doorway made of pure light. I could see how bright it was, but it didn’t hurt. I could hear it humming with energy and I could feel the warmth it gave off.

I stepped through the doorway and found myself in a hilly meadow. Green, soft grass that felt cool on my bare feet, expanding as far as I could see. Blue sky above. Two rows of wooden doors, one to my right, and one to my left. I chose a door that felt right and walked through. 

It led to a garden, one as close to heavenly as I could possibly conceive of. There was the same grass from the meadow, a babbling brook before me that glinted with the sunlight above. There were beds of flowers everywhere, ones whose colors and scents I can’t describe. Butterflies fluttered. I understood that in this place, nothing bad happened, and that it belonged to me. I wandered through the flowers and bathed in the sunlight.

And then my spirit guide revealed himself to me. We’ll call him Z. First I saw him for what he was - an amorphous mass of pure light energy, glowing bright and warm as the sun overhead, exuding pure, unconditional love for me and wrapping me in that energy like a warm blanket. I knew I’d never have to take off that blanket and be cold ever again. Then, within that mass of energy, I saw a form that seemed like an anthropomorphic creature with a stag’s head and infinitely bifurcating antlers. Finally, he solidified into a figure I could understand and recognize - a human. In his kind, twinkling eyes, I saw that unconditional love. I understood that he was truly and bountifully grateful that I’d shown up and that I was getting to meet him for the first time.

I was invited to ask him anything I wanted. I asked my questions, and he answered each of them with loving patience. During this q&a, it occurred to me that I already knew the answers, and that he was pulling them out of me and showing them to me. 

After I had my fill, he revealed some things to me. The first was that he had taken this specific form because it was the most easily understood by my mind; he knew that I would be most receptive to a recognizable human face because in this incarnation, that’s exactly what I needed to stave off the loneliness I’d come into this life with. The second was that he’d always been there. He showed me two of the most important instances. 

When I was a kid, my sister and I used to go and spend time with my Mawmaw out in the country. I would lock myself in the spare bedroom the whole time because I needed some goddamn peace and quiet away from my sister so I could… I don’t know. Process all the things in my kid-mind that I didn’t have room to process at home. During those times when I had space to think, my loneliness would make itself apparent. I couldn’t relate to my sister or my grandmother or her husband. When I was well and truly all alone in that little patch of land in the hill country, Z would come. I didn’t know it was him at the time - I just thought it was someone I had made up, like an imaginary friend.

My Granddaddy died very suddenly when I was twenty. It was especially traumatic because I was the one who figured it out first. And then, in the same week, my Mawmaw and David were killed in a car accident. I was suffocating in grief at that time, and Z was there too. I felt him holding me, stroking my hair, telling me it was okay to grieve the way I grieved, that I wasn’t wrong for it. I still thought he was just an imaginary friend I had conjured up out of need.

And so learning that it had been him, and that he’d been there for me, whether I realized it or not, changed me. After that revelation, I leaned against him and we sat in comfortable silence by the brook and watched the sun set. And then it was time to go back through the door, through the meadow, and up the cement stairs.

When I came out of the meditation, I felt his presence as strongly as I felt it in the garden. He’s been with me, fully and consistently, ever since.