It is a bright sunny nearly Spring morning.
And I, now that I have walked the dog and performed my other morning rituals, am now safely back in my tiny room with the blackout curtains that still never seem dark enough.
I have been thinking a lot about why it is that I am so inclined to literally close out the world as much as possible. There are several reasons, I'm sure.
Maybe even just being a Highly Sensitive Person (which maybe might be a real legitimate scientific thing) is enough to explain a lot of it. I need a place to retreat and recover from the onslaught of sensory information.
But that doesn't explain why I need to retreat as often as I do. Even now, my roommates are at work and I have the house to myself, but it feels draining to be out in the house. My body seems to only unclench when I am in here, with a fan for white noise and sometimes noise cancelling headphones, or hundreds of miles away from anyone that knows me.
And again, I'm sure there are several reasons.
But since I have also been longing for love and intimacy and the feel and taste of a lover's skin, I have been considering my past relationships and sexual history and how those experiences have resulted in me being here, naked and alone in a darkened room.
(I am almost always naked here in my room. It's very Howard Hughes. Might also be explained by hyper-sensitivity, I don't know. Maybe being naked just feels better).
And it strikes me that there are highly relevant things to my current panic-stricken anxiety about sex and relationships, things I am presently experiencing, that I have dared not talk about. Not even on here (my truly sacred space. The one place where I am ever really vulnerable).
And to be fair, it is kind of hard to explain that I feel lonely and am longing for intimacy and sex and connection while at the same time discussing how just a few days ago an attractive woman was weeping on the phone with me, actually begging me to fuck her. It might be hard for someone on the outside to understand why my answer was an emphatic "no."
But this woman (and another that I will talk about next time) have stirred and maintained in me a deep and unsettling fear of ever being vulnerable or intimate again.
That's a bold statement. It's not their fault, per se. They are the trigger, I am the bomb.
But until I learn how to get over this hurdle, here I will stay.
(and I want to be out and about in time for the post-covid summer orgies!)
I met the woman in question, we'll call her C, just a week or two after I moved to Tulsa. Which is to say only a week or two after I got out of the mental hospital. I moved here the day after I got out.
And that bit is important because in hindsight it shouldn't have taken hindsight for me to realize that I was in too vulnerable a place to be dating. But at the time, I was really desperate to feel normal, to feel anything.
Plus, new city, new life. I thought maybe I could finally experience my own sexual revolution and explore my desires and just date for the fun of it. Casual dating is not something I have ever really done and thought it could be fun.
So I met C on Tinder.
And we fucked in an elevator on our first date.
And that began a solid few months of incredibly intense sex. Our chemistry was incredible. I swear we barely even talked. I would come over to her house and we would instantly fall into each with deep, passionate, crazy good sex. Frequently we wouldn't even make it much farther than her front door before at least one of us was undressed with the other's mouth all over them.
We'd go for hours. We'd never do anything else. I think we went out to dinner once. The rest of the time was pure escapist carnal bliss.
(deep sigh. I miss that.)
I was clear in communicating that I was not looking for a committed monogamous thing from the get-go. That was fine for the first week or two, but then began to be a problem. She was offended that I was ok with her sleeping with someone else if she wanted. She became paranoid and jealous even though I wasn't sleeping with anyone other than her. It became such an issue that she would often ask me in the middle of sex whether I was sleeping with anyone else and never believed me when I said no.
She didn't like how much time I spent by myself, always thought I was lying, and as I began to find out, was dealing with an incredible amount of insecurity, mental illness, and untreated trauma.
It was while with C I realized that this was a pattern that keeps playing out over and over in my love life.
I was not raised with a good understanding of boundaries and have had trouble developing them as an adult. Especially when it comes to romantic relationships. And there are many reasons why this is. Attachment style, getting caught up and lost in the emotions of a thing, never wanting anyone to be mad at me, so on and on and on.
And this pastoral/therapist thing sort of kicks in and I become less interested in sex and much more concerned with becoming a sounding board and person that will listen without judgement. I found myself in this place where I was only responding to and caring for her needs and not paying much attention to what I was feeling at all. It was nice to escape into someone else's brain and neurosis for a bit as it got me out of mine. But I did not consider the attachment she was forming. Or at least did not know to what extent.
My last relationship before this one, if we can even call it that, was also extremely intense. It lasted for 7 weeks and we never met in person. We were initially put in contact through a mutual friend who knew that she was just leaving the church and struggling with all that entails and wanted to see if I could provide her some resources or support.
But what happened instead is that we flirted and quickly fell into a whirlwind. My ability to place any boundaries at all were quickly wiped out. She demanded so much of me. We would have to talk on the phone several times a day, sometimes for several hours each time. She would cry and yell at me if I asked for space or to slow down. She demanded I not speak to my female friends. All of our conversations were very raw and triggering and went into a lot of her past abuse in explicit detail.
And I lost myself. Because I can't tell where my emotions ended and hers began.
It was emotionally abusive. Not intentionally, but it was. For months after we broke up, she would still call several times a day and I could never say no to her and so would sit on the phone and just be berated in one minute and then expected to listen and be empathetic the next. I feel like I am not conveying how bad this all was. How terrible and small and so traumatized it made me feel.
And here I was again with C. The same shit happening all over again.
So I tried to end it.
And I tried to end it.
And I tried to end it.
But I don't know what to do when people don't accept my no as an answer. Saying no the first time is hard enough
Some of my friends think I have a savior complex and they are probably right. That C was hurting and really struggling did seem to matter more to me than the fact that I was also struggling and hurting. I wanted to help. I recognized in her a lot of the patterns that I had struggled with a few years before. I thought that maybe I could be the person to her that I need back then.
And she begged me, tearfully pleaded, that I stay in her life in some capacity.
So I asked if we could just be friends, but like really. Like actual friends.
And she said yes. Better me in her life in some way than no way at all.
And we tried but kept having sex and then would have to go through all the emotions of that again and she would lash out and say horrible hurtful things and then apologize the next day.
So we stopped having sex altogether.
But she still would try to initiate sex and I would say no and then we would go through all the emotions and she would lash out just like before.
And this is more or less how things were for a year or more.We could go a few weeks without her breaking down, but it always happened.
For the last few months though, things have been better. Or so I thought. She was honoring my boundaries, not talking about how I must surely hate her and how awful she is all the time, feeling better about herself in general.
Outside of my roommate, she is the only person I have spent any time with. She is one of the only people I even know in this town.
And for a while there, I thought we had a great friendship and I was opening up to her and she to me. It felt nice.
But I didn't know that she would break down into tears every time I'd leave her house. I didn't know that she was just waiting for me to come back around. I didn't know she was blaming and hating herself for not "being enough" or desirable enough for me to want her. That everytime I listened to her or was kind or gave her a compliment, it felt like I was rejecting her all over.
She even accused me recently of only sleeping with her so that she'd be my friend, which is a pretty funny reversal of how that sentence usually goes.
This had come up in the past, but I had, quite sincerely, explained about how emotionally this was all just overwhelming and how I wanted to break from my past patterns and take a break from sex and romance until I was in a healthier place to navigate it. She said she understood.
But we still feel what we feel.
And last week it all came out. It was ugly. She lashed out. I imploded. She apologized the next day.
I don't know what to do. Because I do care about her a lot and she is really working on handling her stuff better. And I feel like I am handling my stuff better, but am clearly doing all sorts of things wrong.
Writing this all out has only reiterated my need to not just break things off with her romantically, but to take a break from all of it in general.
I want to break the pattern.
I want to experience something mutually supportive and affectionate and equal and real.
But I am terrified of trying again. I feel so much shame and pain and blame for her pain. I know it's not my fault, but I can't seem to "know" that it's not my fault.
And the pain that I feel is intense. It's so hard for me to be vulnerable and intimate with people in the first place. I am naturally disposed to aloneness and trust at arm's length. And the times that I have allowed myself to be really open and trusting, like with C during those early days, the result is an attachment that I can't break that only causes each of us harm.
I just want to find some healing. I just want to feel whole. And sure, that real intimate companionship I hear so much about sure does seem nice.
But the pain is too real. The risk is too high.
At least for now. At least until I find another way.
9:25 a.m. - 2021-03-04
Recent entries:
An Open Marriage to Solitude - 2021-05-11
Secret Admirer Unmasked - 2021-05-02
Abstract Expressionism - 2021-04-15
Soul Tornado (that sounds like a Christian book title, doesn't it?) - 2021-03-29
The Letters - 2021-03-13
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