Hey all,
I finally got a half-day off and thought it was time to
write down some of the thoughts bouncing around in my mind. The technical term
for this is idea saltation. It’s a term that I’ve just made up. ::Eddie Izzard voice:: And I’m
backing it up with…this geology license I hope to get.
So here is my view for writing today:
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| This is actually my reality, I can't believe it sometimes. |
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| A recent photo of me, ready made for a by-line |
In the past seven months (whoosh, that went by right quick)
I have been working at a job I love with fascinating people whom I am happy to
hang out with for a drink after work. My office works with other offices all
over the country so I get to meet folks with very different backgrounds and
skill sets than my own. My current work priorities for personal development on
the job are:
- · Consistent demeanor-keeping the same quality and frequency of communication regardless of what’s happening in my personal or personal-professional life (eg. deadlines).
- · Learning how to actually talk to anyone- a misnomer that a lot of my friends have is that I can strike up a conversation with anyone. While this has proved true for most of the circles I have waltzed between in my life, it’s not the case across the board. Specifically: I have been learning how to interact with military personnel better. I have a lot of inherited trauma around military folks, through no fault of the people who passed it on, yet it still remains. It so happens that the branch of military my grandfather (who was an abusive ass) served is the same branch that I work with regularly for my job.
- · Communication!- Deadlines, expectations, duration of work, intensity of work, boundaries around topics that I feel OK talking about, boundaries when topics I don’t feel OK talking about.
- · Programming-I’m finally learning how to code in Python. Because it just seems like a better idea than doing everything manually. I’ve also become significantly more proficient in Microsoft Excel, which has eased some of my pain. And I mean literal pain, my ergo situation is ever-evolving and not close to being pain-free. Despite being an A+ couch potato, it seems being sedentary is not easy for me.
So that’s what I’m working on. It’s hard. I won’t pretend or
assume it’s anything but hard.
In the past 7 months I’ve thought a lot about my
relationships and how they are interwoven into my mental health. I work A Lot™,
my availability in general has decreased, possibly a hundredfold from my
availability when I was unemployed. During my
unemployment I focused a lot on building
relationships; strengthening, deepening, evaluating, asking a lot, giving back
a lot, building my friends up, letting my friends support me.
Between personality and circumstance, I’ve always been in
touch with A Lot™ of people. Once my therapist asked me to make a map so she could
keep up with all the people I talked about. I got to several hundred people in
visual format similar to a force directed diagram before I gave up. This was at least 3 years before Facebook. I
remember people’s names, their faces, their stories, their joys, and their
pain. Especially when I’m rested and focused like I was during my unemployment.
Now that I’m fully employed, I don’t have the bandwidth that I used to and I’m
noticing that I’m not as capable of managing all the relationships.
On top of my proving period (about 5 months of nearly back
to back travel) being physically and emotionally challenging, I took on another
challenge: get the first part of my geology licensure. The department of
Professional Geologists in the Golden State are trying to mimic the process the
Engineers have laid out. I’m certain it also behooves the geologists because it gets them more money.
What this means for me, the SaraBe, is that I can take a $500 test now (3 years
out of school) and then take another $500 test in 3 more years so that I can
sign legal documents. The only study material available is not only
boring: it’s badly written, incorrect more times than is acceptable, out of
touch and really poor at explaining how to pivot one’s background in academia
into industry. I am going to write a competing study guide and publish it when
I have my license in 3-5 years. Testing for competence shouldn’t be an
endurance test in masochism.
In order to achieve this goal of studying and taking my exam
(which I took this morning) I have shifted around my life a lot. This shifting,
as with all my shifts, has led me to evaluate my relationships, and check in with
where I was a year(ish) ago when I wrote my PeopleKeeper post. I’m
going to break out the types of relationships I’ve seen evolve in the past
year, moving from negative to positive. Unsurprisingly, there will be
a playlist for these categories so be sure to click on links for music. (In addition to my regular play list for the blog at large.)
Brief content warning: mention of rape and stalking.
Click this if you want to skip that.
Contact Severed
Only a couple people from my original list (or people who
weren’t on the list but existed regularly in my life) were people who I actively
severed contact with.
One of them was accused of being a serial rapist. I was not
close with this person, I had no direct involvement in these allegations and I
did not follow what/if the resolution on this series of events was. I know this
person was an active organizer whose parties I occasionally attended but it
wasn’t difficult for me to fade from that scene when I was on the road 70% of
the time. The whole affair was triggering for me as I was much more intimately
involved in something similar when I was 13 so I noped out pretty hard pretty
quick.
The other person was someone whose friendship had always
been exhausting for me but over the past couple years it built up to the point
where they were stalking me. This is someone who I cannot avoid completely
because they attend my synagogue but the leadership of the shul took care of
the situation in as much as they could. This was extremely difficult for me
because there were weeks where I couldn’t attend services because I just had
panic attacks. PartnerPenguin was amazing in taking care of me and making sure
I left when I needed to leave and breathed as much as I could. Mega props to
the current leadership body for listening to me, taking me seriously and
treating the situation with gravity.
The Somebodies
I Used To Know
This category is a little less cut and dry from my previous
category and it’s probably the category I struggle the most with. These are not
people who have acutely wronged me, just more…death by a thousand paper cuts. A
lot of my biological relatives are in this category. People who have
occasionally made my swear allegiance or loyalty but who have never actually
been interested in me as a person.
An illustration of this kind of person was someone whom I
hadn’t seen in months and we finally spend much of an evening together. They
asked me how I was doing and I spent care and energy into responding how was
drowning in work but they were important to me so I carved out an evening to
spend with them. Throughout the evening they then asked me three more times how I was doing, closing out the evening with “we
should catch up some time.” This was painful, but ultimately it made me realize
that listening to me was not a priority for this person and there was nothing I
could do about it.
Standard Partiers
I like to grow my friendships in predominately 1:1 settings,
often revolving around food, often at my house. My relationship bonds
strengthen best during long-ish periods of unstructured or semi-structured time
together, so I try to create such spaces. Some people like to maintain their
relationships through parties (usually >10 people), touching base
periodically and superficially. I am happy to attend these parties but I’ve
learned that I’m not going to bank on the friendships I cultivate in these
spaces to be deep enough for strong emotional support unless I supplement them
with other types of interactions.
Don't get me wrong. I love partying. I just don't expect to do most of my heavy lifting in my friendships in this context.
Several people who I had on my PeopleKeeper list interact
with their relationships in a way that I had not understood previous to trying
this experiment: their partner performs most of the friendship maintenance. I
have seen several pairings of people who do this. The level of emotional labor expected by society, usually on women, to maintain relationships,
plan free time and keep house to have friends over shines through when I have
tried to maintain friendships with people whose partner does a lot of their
emotional labor. I have trouble getting in touch with some of these people. One
person appeared randomly back in my life after 3 years of no contact because
they were in a relationship and just…didn’t keep in touch with any of their
friends. Even with my best friends, I have sometimes given up on being friends
with their spouses because they just don’t put any work into being my friend in
return and assume their partner will maintain that bond. But usually when I
show up in person they listen to me so they are neutral to me.
I have several communities right now that I participate in
regularly given the locational availability and energy level.
The first is my weekly gaming group who meet the host’s home,
and usually have 10 people or less per event. We have dinner together and there
is always SaraSafe food (no nightshades) even if means the host makes a
separate meal just for me. Sometimes it’s tacos (we gather on Tuesday, after
all) and sometimes it’s sous-vide pork cheek or <three-stroke meat
engine> that have cooked for at least 12 hours. Sometimes I participate in
games like <Colors, Fucking Colors>, sometimes I don’t. And it’s always
OK. Everyone sees each other weekly so we generally know what’s going on in
each others lives. It’s friendship on easy mode.
One thing that’s great about this group is that the two
people who host recently got married and I got to see for the first time a
wedding that reflected something much closer to what I want in a wedding
ceremony (we’ll have one someday, I swear). The bridal party was not split by
bride and groom because everyone was everyone’s friend. The women wore dresses
and the men wore suits and everyone was color matched and lovely in that
formality. The vows were said in a “yes, and” fashion: the bridge said one line
and the groom responded “I’ll do that and this additional thing”. The officient
was a friend and he made no presumption of having God involved (which worked,
for this crowd). After the bride and groom exchanged vows, the audience was
invited to vow to support the couple. I really liked that.
I was so full of joy and love that I cried the whole night.
In fact I cried so much that salt crystals formed on my eyes:
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| I cried myself some minerals! |
Other communities I have in this category are my shul, my other regular gaming groups, and the friends I see rarely but spend time with intensely throughout the year. And of course, my travel buddies. In the past couple years I’ve brought my “states visited” count up to 23. Here are some photos from some of the more recent trips:
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| The great and powerful Mississippi River |
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| ....yes.... |
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| American Victoria Falls |
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| Buddy, your soul is supposed to stay inside your body. So's your skeleton. |
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| Crappy quality but I did see the Northern Lights |
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| Just a pup in -10°F being OK with life. |
With the national political situation, my job being as
intense as it is and interfacing with my own and my friends mental illnesses it
feels extraordinarily good to have good friends and celebrate happy events. It
reminds me that there is balance and that this past year has been net good.
The best thing about being a queer adult is that the concept
of Found Family is understood and, while not ubiquitous, is prevalent. My
little group of new family are the people whom I can be around, no matter how
we’re feeling and it’s OK that we’re not entertaining or happy. We can just be. It’s extremely freeing to have
multiple people with whom I can just be
my complete self.
I had a lot of negative experiences growing up where I was
told that we were having family time and that would mean we would “have fun,
damnit.” I think sometimes when I reflect on the nuclear family I had growing
up that none of us understood how to be there for each other in the ways we
needed to be supported. Instead there was a lot of shame and at time coercion
to “act like we liked each other” instead of genuinely liking each other.
The intentionality I’ve brought to my new family folks is
that when you’re in my found family you’re in as your whole self. That’s hard
and takes a lot of work on all parties involved, so there are only a few people
who hold this place in my life. I think one of the most important conversations
I ever had was with someone who holds me in found family status and they
explained that I had committed a transgression serious enough to cut ties
unless I made swift and lasting change to my behavior. Having this conversation
allowed me to see that just because this category exists, it doesn’t mean that
abuse or bad behavior has to be tolerated.
A surprise for me in this past year is how big of a
difference having a found family has made on my spiritual life. I am regularly
celebrating smaller Jewish holidays that I’ve never celebrated before because I
have the support to do so. We have more conversation around Judaism than I’ve
ever had voluntarily in my life. I like
the amount of Judaism I’ve worked in and I feel supported to include more if it
seems right to do so.
I am happy to announce that PartnerPenguin and I have celebrated
our first decade together! 10 whole years of being awesome! The best part about
renewing for an 11th season of this show is that we jumped the shark
somewhere in…like…season 2? So there’s nowhere more ridiculous for us to go. We’re still two goofballs with odd
senses of humor who make each other laugh every day. We’ve learned to have
arguments without putting the foundation of our relationship at stake. We have
established that we’re not going anywhere so it’s OK to try new things and get
out of our comfort zone. I am proud of us. I was trying to only do two comparison photos but then I did 4. GIANT, PHOTO LADEL BLOG POST FOR ALL!
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| Casual then-shirts read Feztival (2002) and Vader was Framed |
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| Even our casual now looks like we're about to drop an emo album |
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| Fancy then-Rockin' that Moulin Rouge themed Prom |
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| Yeah, basically still rockin' the same theme with no prompts |
I do hope to have some sort of wedding, probably about 3
years from now on the 10th anniversary of us being married. That
seems like enough time to ease into the idea, save, plan and decide what we want
the event to be. In the meantime I’ve started wearing a ring that I feel suits
me on an everyday basis. I think it looks like it fell out of a mountain and
happens to fit my finger. You can decide for youself:
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| I am really really excited about this |
In closing today, I’ll just leave you with Janelle Monae’s “Make Me Feel” or: “I am exactly as bisexual as I thought I was.
