I AM NOT DEAD

[potato_head]

ETA FROM THE FUTURE: Oh god this is so much less coherent than I thought it was LMFAO. I blame endorphins.


I CAN MOVE MY LEG

THIS IS THE GREATEST DAY

Okay my leg is obviously not completely healed yet but it's so much better than it was and I can actually think straight and all! And I have this amazing goopy stuff I can put on it to cool it down if it starts giving me trouble again.

So I know I promised a post on ghost theory but as clear as my head is, I am not sure it's quite clear enough for that yet, since it involves going through old memories and theories that I've mostly put aside because really, ghosts are not at all my area of expertise. Legends about ghosts? Yeah, sure, I do keep track of every legend I read. But real, actual ghosts? No. I have schemas and all to understand them, but it doesn't really come natural to me nor interest me the way faeries do, so I don't automatically encode the information, nor can I easily call up that information. Basically, it involves going up into the attic of my brain to get down that holiday stuff that I hardly ever use but the relatives are coming over so we have to make the house look good

Okay are you starting to see what I mean about coherent but not coherent enough? Alright good, because I totally didn't mean to ramble like that, but I'm leaving that all there.

So the point I was trying to get to was, I was all ready to do ghost theory, or alternatively talk about faeries in graveyards which would be a lot easier but also I think pretty short so I would rather wait to combine that with some other faerie theories or maybe with an actual visit to a graveyard like I was all geared up to do until my leg

----skipping to the point, instead I realized what I actually want to talk about is polyamory and how I, personally, experience it. And I realized I don't really talk about it much on my journal, do I, and most of you probably don't even know that I'm poly because by 'not much' I mean 'not at all'.

Just to be clear here, this post is going to be about me being poly and not really poly in general. If it's about anything. It might just be a good example of how I function when healing from a minor injury.

So...being poly. I guess I should start with like, a definition of polyamory? Well, it basically just means loving more than one person at a time (romantically/sexually). There are all sorts of ways to be polyamorous, including closed relationships with more than two people, or open relationships.

"So would somebody cheating on their partner be poly?" you may ask. My answer is, yes, they may be. If they love both their partner and their other lover, yes. But that doesn't make it okay. A person in a poly relationship can cheat too, depending on the relationship rules and guidelines. Any time you find yourself lying to your partner(s) and/or breaking the rules you and your partner(s) laid down together (without consulting them first), it's cheating. And I really shouldn't talk any more on that point because I did not at any point intend this post to be about cheating, it's something I don't really have any personal experience in and this post is about me waugh


Okay so I think that's poly 101 out of the way. If not you can find it...somewhere else? I'll get a link to a less confused poly 101 up here later yeah? Sound good? Okay good.

So there's debate that goes around about whether or not monogamy (monoamory?) vs. polyamory is an ingrained preference or whether it's just the state of your current relationship and etc etc. I'm not really going to weigh in on those debates, except to say being poly doesn't make one "more highly evolved" (which doesn't actually make sense btw, that's one of those things up there with equating correlation and causation that will make me side-eye someone pretty hard, if you're going to use evolution as an ~argument~ understand it first) or better than people in monogamous relationships, really, that's stupid, yeah?

But I know for me, personally, being poly is an ingrained preference, absolutely. It's pretty much the first thing I knew about myself for sure, before my gender, before my sexuality, I knew I would never be able to be with just one person forever and ever. I knew it as a kid watching Disney movies and wondering why anybody would ever want to /marry/ the prince when there are so many other great people out there as well (note that one can be in a poly relationship and married, but as a young'un I did not really know that).

And yes, I did, for awhile, wonder if this was actually just an indication that I was 'afraid of commitment'. Being poly was also one of the things I most questioned myself about. I actually worried about this on and off for years, but then I realized something; I'm not afraid of commitment at all. I commit rather easily, actually. I have planned my future with other people before, being a part of their life, them being a part of mine, even raising children together; it's just that that future included, potentially, other people along with us, or besides them. So - that pretty much settled the matter, for me. I actually really enjoy being committed to someone, if I trust them and want to be with them for the forseeable forever, but I don't need it, either. At this point I figure - I'm pretty healthy, in that regard.

There's also the fact that I still don't know what it feels like to be 'jealous', romantically. I can't imagine it, I don't think I have the capacity to feel or understand that. Not that I judge people who do. I used to, but I've mostly worked that out. It still confuses me, but I'm well aware being jealous is not something people do so much as something they feel.

So...I have never, in my life, been in a closed relationship. I've thought about it. I know I wouldn't be able to stand it. I don't know how to love only one person. It's not a matter of needing more than one person, but - well, frankly, there's no difference for me in how I feel towards a close friend vs. a lover; a person can drift back and forth across that line with me and I wouldn't care one bit. I could, obviously, refuse to be sexually involved with anybody else, but that emotional connection would still be there unless I completely cut myself off from my friends, and that wouldn't be fair to my partner or to me.

So I've been in open relationships. Several, actually. It's surprising, looking back on it. I've had several relationships that lasted a few months or less, and three that lasted a lot longer, that overlapped. Which is basically where I saw one of the ways my relationship style can go really terrible, because none of those three relationships were healthy; and basically it became a situation where I ended one of the relationships and flew right into the next one at top speed, relying completely on that person rather than dealing with the fallout from the last relationship individually (well, it was my first really terrible breakup and also the first time someone had called me a gender-traitor, I think we're all allowed a few mistakes, I was just unlucky enough to rebound with someone who quickly became emotionally abusive). And then I was bouncing back and forth between that and the third, both of whom were...not treating me well at all, and both crying accusations of abuse at the other, which rather than waking me up made me feel like I had to mediate between them.

So, yeah. That went on for a long time. Over five years of being with both of them, on and off, because both relationships were constantly on the rocks. I've been out of all that for...erm...almost a year now, maybe? Ah, wait. Since this past summer vacation, neh? So indeed, almost a year. And it made me really wary of getting back into relationships, and I'm still sorting out where I went wrong and what issues and insecurities I have from all of that. Which led to me rather dragging my feet a lot on things with anobjectinspace, and I want to say 'jerking him around' except I'm pretty sure he didn't mind because he is endlessly patient (especially with me) and just completely awesome, so I will just say dragging my feet. But yes, I would say we are in some sort of relationship now. Long-distance-y thing. I THINK HE SURE IS SWELL. I mean, I drew him a gift for Valentine's so I think everyone figured that out but yeah.

So yes. That is where I am and where I have been. There are a lot of labels available for me to use in the poly world, like, for example, primary and secondary, but I have never found them to be of use, personally, for me. As I've already said, my depth of feeling is the same for friends vs lovers; I can't imagine really distinguishing between lovers. In the future I might find such terms useful based on other factors, like level of commitment or things. I don't know. But I can't, personally, imagine caring about one person more than another, especially not people I've chosen to have in my life. It's not how I function.

This may sound like I just sort of go where the wind blows and...am not really sure how I function, in terms of relationships. That's not really true. As someone who's in a position to know has said about me recently, I tend to know where I'm going, but I don't sweat the details of how I get there. What I want is to be able to give love and support to the fantastic people in my life that I care about. In this case, details like labels and hierarchies are not something that concern me.


In retrospect I don't know if this entry actually was anything like what I was planning. Or is even coherent. Oh well, there it is, I guess o u o