This is two stories in one.

This is the story of almost losing myself again. 

Earlier this month, I began writing this blog post and it started like this:

I feel like I’m losing my ever-loving fucking mind, people.

I’m so goddamn tired of being wrong again about the people I fall in love with. I’m exhausted from being in relationships where the other person says the most absolutely amazing things about me, only to turn around and criticize and hurt me. The same people who have spoken the sweetest things to me I’ve ever experienced have also spoken the cruelest. Like, why? Just tell me why, somebody. Because I sure as hell do not understand.

Things with Micah are feeling tumultuous these days.

This relationship has been a speedrun. We fell in love almost instantaneously, if I’m being honest, and things got very serious very fast. We’ve talked openly about marriage, between the two of us and with our kids. He bought an engagement ring. He got a tattoo of my bite mark on his arm. And none of those things felt rushed or scary in the slightest. 

But things over the past couple of weeks have been wildly up and down. Micah started having complaints about various things in our relationship, and I was getting frequently triggered. I discovered that I have CPTSD from years of emotional abuse, and many of the things that Micah does in conflict have triggered severe panic attacks. He’s always immediately paused the conflict and comforted me, to his credit. But he’s also been the one causing them, not making adjustments that I’ve asked him to make to prevent them, and then using them against me as ways that I’m making him feel unsafe to share his feelings.

Side note, this also has a lot to do with what was happening with Truly in the final weeks of our relationship. He would come to me with negative feelings, I would get defensive because I was being triggered, he would continue in the name of “feeling heard,” and I would shut down. With him at least I didn’t go into a full-on PTSD emotional flashback and literally run scream-crying from the room to hide in a closet. True story.  

In the two weeks since writing that, things got worse and then better… over and over until I damn near lost my ability to feel any kind of way about it. I numbed myself and shoved my feelings so far down that they may never be found again. But as the smoke is now clearing, I think that we’re finally in a good place. Lord Almighty, was it a battle to get here. 

How to even summarize the events of the last two weeks? 

Well, let’s see. I started struggling super hard with the behavior I was experiencing from Micah, but he couldn’t see it and didn’t understand when I tried to confront it; that ultimately ended in me telling him I didn’t know if we could work because the cycle felt abusive, and then him breaking up with me. We struggled back and forth for days, trying to find a balance between his need for security and my need for safety and independence. We finally managed to reconcile for about twenty seconds before it all blew up again. 

One of the realizations I came to during those horrible days was that I’d been eroding my polyamorous lifestyle to try to please him, and I couldn’t do that anymore for my own well-being. I’d already been having thoughts of trying to start a relationship again with Romeo, and when Micah broke up with me and I was in a very dark place, I turned for comfort to the person who I knew would be there for me with no strings attached. One thing led to another and we ended up rekindling something, which I decided to continue to explore regardless of whether Micah and I could work things out. One of the awesome things about poly is that I have the freedom to do that.

But Micah didn’t see it that way. He was furious when I told him that I wanted to be in a relationship with Romeo again. He demanded that I choose between them– but I told him that I couldn’t do that, because it isn’t about choosing one of them over the other. Rather, it’s about me doing what I feel is best for myself, and having the confidence to do that because my autonomy is something I will never let anybody take from me again. 

Accepting that choice has been incredibly difficult for Micah. Many times, I thought that it wouldn’t happen and I prepared myself to let him go. The decision of whether we were going to be together or not felt like a rollercoaster with an absurd number of tiny hills. I lost track of how many times he said we were over, then changed his mind. I tried to stay steady with what I could offer him; my love and my time, but not all of me. 

At this point, we seem to have come to a compromise of sorts. I still want to marry him, but I need to feel emotionally safe before I can do that, and I can’t put a timeline on that. I am hopeful that we can work on our approaches to conflict and get to a place where emotional safety is possible for both of us. We’ve also discussed what a marriage could look like for us, considering that I do not believe in having a relationship hierarchy. The good thing is that our desires for this relationship do seem to be compatible, even if they aren’t identical. 

For my side of things, I have found a lot of peace in remembering that I am my own primary partner. I will not allow my happiness to be contingent upon somebody else’s feelings or behavior, no matter how much I love that person. I will not lose myself in loving someone else again. Been there, done that, have no interest in going back. 

In conflicts with Micah, I need to continue to become less reactive, be clear about my boundaries, communicate as thoroughly as possible, and truly absorb the reality that my partner’s feelings are not my responsibility. I have struggled to balance validating feelings with accepting responsibility for accusations that aren’t valid. I’m getting a lot better at it, though. 

As for my poly life, I am no longer limiting myself to try to make Micah happy. I want him to be happy, of course, but not at the expense of my own needs. I can only hope that we can work together to build security for him within the framework of me continuing to practice my “relationship anarchy” style of polyamory. At this time, I have no interest in dating or starting any new relationships, and I could easily see that being the case indefinitely. Instead, my focus is on enjoying the relationships I already have and continuing to become my truest self. 

On that note, as if the past month hasn’t been emotionally draining enough, I’ve also had to accept the end of a relationship that I didn’t see coming… because last week Audrey broke up with me.

Which brings me to my second part of this post: This is the story of not being gay enough. 

My love for Audrey has always been quieter than my love for the male partners in my life. When I started dating her and fell in love with her, I realized that it felt very different for me. It was the main reason I changed my sexual orientation identity from pansexual to omnisexual; because omnisexuality specifically means that you are attracted to different genders in different ways, whereas pansexuality is more of a “hearts not parts” mentality. It’s the difference between being attracted to any gender (pansexual) versus all genders (omnisexual)– a very nuanced concept, but something that resonated deeply with me. 

When I say that my love for Audrey was quieter, what I mean is that it wasn’t exciting for me in the same way that relationships with men tend to be. I felt deep fondness for her, enjoyed and looked forward to our time together, and wished to continue to love her for many years– optimistically the rest of my life. I think she’s beautiful and smart and funny and sweet and kind and thoughtful, to name just a few things I love about her. I loved kissing her, cuddling with her, holding her hand, and being close to her. Sexually speaking, we had some really incredible times together. 

But no matter how much I loved her, I couldn’t help the fact that she didn’t give me butterflies, and my desire for sexual intimacy was much, much lower than hers in our relationship. I wish that I could have felt what she wanted me to feel, because she deserves to feel desired and pursued. It simply wasn’t something I was able to provide for her, and I truly hope that she can find that with someone else. I wish for her to have everything she wants in this life, and I was only getting in the way. 

The other aspect of our breakup was Audrey’s feelings about my choices in revisiting a relationship with Romeo, as well as continuing to fight for a relationship with Micah despite the alarming events so early on. She essentially said that it felt to her like I was self-sabotaging, and she didn’t have the heart to watch. 

That wasn’t the first time I felt judged by her, and I certainly have a lot of frustration that she seems to believe that she knows what’s best for me more than I do. Of course I make mistakes and bad choices sometimes, but those are mine to make. This is my life, and I want people in it who can support me even when they don’t agree with my decisions. I appreciate hearing other perspectives from people who care about me, but I have no interest in being beaten over the head with them. Since being supportive wasn’t something that she felt able to do at that point, I can only agree that the best choice was to end our relationship. 

I’m sad that I couldn’t be the girlfriend she needed, nor could she be that for me. It feels super shitty that we couldn’t work things out. I really did envision a long future for us, and adjusting to that being just suddenly gone is hard. 

But, I always try to laugh about my trials because laughing feels better than crying. And right now, I’m finding it pretty funny that all I really wanted was for my girlfriend to support me dating my ex-husband and my new boyfriend who just finished breaking up with me at least once per day for like a week straight, and for that same boyfriend to also be supportive of me dating my ex-husband who abused me for five years, and also to be supportive of me being with my girlfriend of course, and for my ex-husband to be supportive of me continuing to date my new boyfriend who has begun to behave in alarmingly similar ways, not to mention my long-distance boyfriend continuing to be his wonderfully loving and supportive self about everything going on with all of my other partners; he is my island of peace in this sea of turmoil. 

Is that really so much to ask???

Yeah… poly really isn’t for everyone.