cut off at the pass

I just skimmed through a few posts from 2006.
What a mess.
It's so perfect a strategy: I hid actual, cohesive thoughts and feeling under a layer of illegible writing with no punctuation and no spell check. I mean, yes, at the time I was practicing presenting outwardly how messy I was discovering my internal world to be- but boy! I can barely wade through a paragraph of that stuff.
And that was my KEEP AWAY: writing, posting, yet still hiding.

I find Taz of 2006 exhausting.
In 2006 my whole community had found me exhausting but I had my head too far up my own issues to be able to respond in any compassionate way.
I’ve made enough space in my head and heart to be able to say I’m sorry.
Still little hard to say…
But Sorry.

I'm back posting again because I am reminded, after reading (trying) those older posts, how much of me was a tantruming child/teenagefuckyou bitchgoddess. In 2006 I was trying to deny this behaviour hardcore. But the observations were astute and the evidence undeniable.

I no longer consider her some embarrassing anomaly to my otherwise altruistic and pleasant disposition. She can't sneak up on me spoil the good (read likable) girl effect because I no longer present as good. or nice or helpful or peaceful. I actually really really wanted be a good(read likeable)girl. I couldn’t understand why I insisted on being so unpleasant and badly behaved. It was like a monster in my basement.
Turns out I just needed to give her attention. Now when I feel something "unflattering to my self image" bubbling up I let her have it out and I find it does me a world of good to let loose with some childish irrational rant. or tears. or joy. or strange noises. whatever.

So as I'm writing that I'm excited that I have come to some landmark of growth and maturity in the previous post , I thought it would be wise to cut off possible future tantrums at the pass by just giving 5 year old Taz/teenage fuckyou girl/bitchgoddess the floor now

HOW DARE YOU!
HOW DARE YOU LOVE ANYBODY ELSE BUT ME?!
THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE! I'M THE BEST EVERYTHING! IN THE WHOLE WORLD!
WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU? ARE YOU INSANE?
YOU DON'T LOVE ME AT ALL!
YOU LOVE EVERYBODY ELSE BUT ME!
I HATE YOU
I'M NEVER TALKING TO YOU AGAIN
BOY ARE YOU GOING TO BE SORRY!
PUNISH HIM!
OFF WITH HIS HEAD!

Whoooo! Aw! That's so awesome- I can't tell you.
Try it at home!
And the beauty is, now I won't do that. Cause I can look at it on the page and on the one hand laugh at how silly it is and on the other hand know that I’m due to give myself a hefty helping of love cause, well, at the end of the day that's what all this and all kafuffles are about.
knowwhadimean?

Hmmm.

Interesting, Interesting.

It’s been years now that I’ve said I’ve wanted an open relationship. Basically I’ve been working out my parents’ relationship through my own experiences- figuring out how to create happier endings as more than two parties try to negotiate their relationships. My mom has struggled with competition and infidelity in her 2 major relationships and I’ve wanted to wipe out the concept of cheating from my world as completely unnecessary.

True to the Scorpio experience I started out at 17 as a master of the all-consuming, all-involving, all-possessing relationship. The soul-meld so bonded that, it turns out, takes years and years and years to loosen. That first partner was a Scorpio too. Our relationship lasted seven and a half years. We spoke a few months ago. He needed to check in and make sure that the impact I made on his life is equal to his on mine. He was happy to hear that he remains a live part of me- the way I write my G`s, in my art at times, the way I hear his voice when I speak French. And so so much more. We need to know we`ve deeply changed each other. We’re funny that way.

We were supposed to be monogamous. But I never was. My spirit was always open to the attention and affections of my male friends. It was fear based. Scarcity based. It came right out of my childhood. My mother is quite emotionally alive but not as demonstrative as I needed as a child, Dad was a Birthday, Christmas, Easter card, and Uncle became very intellectually present for me as I grew, but always maintained physical and emotional space. In my relationship with G, I had had a taste of what it was to have all the touch and attention and sexual sensation I could ask for. All the demonstrative love I could ever want. .But because I didn’t have a handle on where the need arose from, it went unquestioned. I just took and took (gave and gave) and sought more. I look back now and feel sorry for him- trying to put human amounts of love and attention into a void that was bottomless. There was no end to my capacity for that attention and I relished my flirtations, the sexual chemistry that infused most of my friendships.

I had an elaborate set of moral guidelines I followed. But they were not his guidelines and my actions continually undercut the trust in our relationship for years. It wasn’t until we broke up ( he was convinced that my saying I wanted to live on my own before living with him was code for I’m going to find someone else. So he beat me to the imagined punch and found someone else.) that I discovered that the way I had been living, my openness to relating to others and my elaborate moral guidelines had a name. Poly amory, poly fidelity. In its best expression, having loyal and responsible relationships to more than one person.

To me, polyfidelity, like everything, is personal and political - I’ve wanted to fuck with what I’ve been taught about “owning” a man for many reasons. It used to be such an attractive concept. So emotionally secure. So useful to access power in a society that favours men. “My man”. Breath sigh of relief here. But at this point I know there is no ownership, “Emotional security” is emotional death and there are no shortcuts for me in negotiating power within a patriarchy. I have to do it for myself.

So the “emotional security of monogamy” became to me just one of the many stories we tell ourselves in order to buffer the reality of motion and change and the sometimes (often) frightening autonomy of our lives. We try to manage our fear of the changing nature of.. everything. Of events, of life itself. I figure that whether we choose to acknowledge that we build on shifting ground or not, the reality remains nevertheless. And I grappled with that in my best-constructed(tightly controlled?) relationships. I know that if I want to live as a sexually autonomous person I need to figure out how to loosen the hold of fear and allow the people I love that same right. L-e-t-t-i-n-g-g-o.

Politically I know that Capitalism needs the social isolation of marriage, monogamy and “the nuclear family” to perpetuate itself. And whereas my understanding of what capitalism is has been changing I still know that my sense of relating and sex in relating is at odds with the puritans and the patriarchs who like women’s cunts on lockdown and those are influences I like to stay at odds with. (Motherfuckers.)

More truthfully, actually , is that I have fully integrated the puritans and the patriarchs into my psyche and I need to tackle the voices in my own head that put the stranglehold on my ability to enjoy sex and pleasure in general.

I`ve been wanting an open relationship. And by golly- for the first time I think I can/ will /am doing it. Not just talking about it, but doing monogamy anyway, as I have done thus far.
I watched my lover with his lover and I walked away feeling… empty. Half hour, an hour, three hours… there was a disquieting lack of … fallout. Where was my fear? Where was the jealousy? Where was the elaborate strategizing to ensure my relationship was not “threatened”?

Something had shifted. I had had this feeling once before walking away from an hours-long conversation in a very small room with an ex- neo Nazi. Something familiar that was missing. I felt the absence of fear. I was bewildered and a little scared. What would I do if I was fearless? I t was my first inkling that I use fear to anchor myself. Here again I was weirded out. Something very old had moved.

It was this: Sex and exclusive sexual connection, which I still clung to as the most special, the most sacred, the unsharable, the unduplicatable, had been dethroned at long last. There it was, before my eyes, sex being shared and ,while maybe not duplicated, she sure looked like she was having as much fun as I do! And I was okay. In her pleasure nothing had been taken from me.
So there it was. The power switch of sex had been flipped and with it went the fear of losing it. Losing the person who brought with them this “divine expression”. And even gone was the temptation I battle with quietly against manufacturing and trying to hold that power over my partner.

So old these things. I know I’ve been working on it for some years now but when the time came where I could see and feel the result of having actually come to this point of growth it felt like Poof! Gone! I was in freefall. I guess I hadn’t actually envisioned what the shift would look like. I guess I never anticipated that I would feel good after freeing myself from this stuff. I had just focused on the work.

I’ve been in “I can’t believe it” mode for half a day now. I’m writing because it feels like a good note to resume my blog on. And I’m doing it on this Azania -originated blog because that I can look another human being in the eyes and say I think its safe to love me comes directly from the shit I created/lived through/ worked through in and after Azania. If there was a Thank You large enough to encompass all the ways I have been changed for the better by this …phenomenon that was that collection of people.. I would send it out like a...I don’t know, a song or a prayer or a blessing that they can count on. Thank You. Thank you. Thank You. You guys have saved my life to put it most simply. More specifically what I have now are the tools, some given freely, some stolen, some created in the solitude of my processing post-Azania, to create the life I want, as accurately as I want. I can think of nothing more useful or more powerful. So I guess my thank you is a s big as that.