I’m thinking about the -email that I got from my beautiful girl this morning. It came a few days ago, but she made a lot turn over in my head that’s just not finished. Here’s the line that got me in a good way. She said something about me deciding I was the only arbiter of the friendship/relationship. I said something bothered me, she adjusted. I was upset at last interaction that she called it “this thing we’ve created and managed,” and I felt like I’d been mortally wounded. It seemed very dismissive of what we’d built and/or destroyed.
The entire truth of our relationship rests on that slash.
Because that slash rests on our burn. We can’t sit down and “and/or our way through something.” I’ll say too much, she’ll say too little. She is content to let me think what I think, when I’m starving for her input. I’m the arbiter of our relationship because she stopped throwing down. We couldn’t move any better, stronger, or faster than the day before because when she walls off, my history is to go off like a chihuahua because her distance makes my trauma bond scream.
At the same time, she’s not responsible for treating me or bending toward me just because I’m having a moment. I have never been telling her to jump in and fix things. I’ve been telling her that if she wants a relationship with me, here’s what I need from her. If not, we can’t have a relationship because too much has happened for me to both manage those trauma bonds and the relationship concurrently. That’s because when she wants me to be close, I don’t have a problem with that. I have a problem with middle-of-the-road, will they or won’t they bullshit. I cannot de-escalate anything because either the trauma bond goes off or it doesn’t. There’s no middle ground. It feels very much like being an addict. If I can’t have hard drugs because I’m addicted to them, the right answer is not “just do a little bit less heroin.” There are so many layers as to why I have a trauma bond that screams, but part of it is that there’s not just one. We have the childhood trauma dump, and what I’ve come to call “the hard out.” I cannot tell you everything I know, and I cannot tell you everything she knows, either.
So, part of the reason that I paint my feelings as fact is that I am trying to talk around a lot of shit. I am weaving the tale as I see it according to the limits I’m trying to enforce, because I have a hell of a story I’m not writing at the same time I’m trying to describe my life. But whatever anyone knows outside the two of us, it’s not enough to make sense of anything that I could say if things were different.
So, I would imagine that when Supergrover thinks I’m bagging on her, she’s not getting the real story before my blog entries get published, so when she reads, she’s not taking it into account. That I am not blaming her, I am blaming the situation and circumstances because I cannot actually tell you about the situation and circumstances.
In protecting her, I have probably made things worse. But I don’t feel bad about it, because there’s no possible way that I’d be okay without being able to use this space as a tool. I write my way into and out of things all the time. She’s an easy target because she brought those circumstances into my life, but I am not taking my anger out on her. I project that anger onto the character because I have a hard out.
I am exhausted and I feel it in my bones. That I know we’ll be successful, but not based on anything that happened in the past. She’s going to have to step up, because I’ve adjusted my vision and realized the ways in which we aren’t good for each other. I have told her those things a number of times, and while she has managed to say what she doesn’t like, she’s never said what she does. I mean, even to the minimum. I know she likes Diet Coke and coffee. I know she likes Jack Daniels. I know she likes pizza. I know those things about most of America. Random factoids that have added up in all kinds of ways, but those I can talk about… because they’re not close to the hard out.
Nothing that I have written on my web site in 10 years has had the real story, and it never will. So my process is trying to find things I can write about. It’s not sordid or illicit. It’s the purest love I’ve ever known. Still can’t talk about it.
Trauma bonds are tricky because again, when you try to break them it makes you weak, like physical withdrawal. I can handle being away from her the longer it goes on, because when we’re not interacting I’m not feeding said bond milk and cookies. I’m not babying it and allowing it to grow.
And none of it is even close to her fault, because I could deal with the hard out so much better if we were collaborating. It’s not a hostage situation over here. I am not saying, “I have a trauma bond so you must accommodate me.” I am saying that both being together and apart causes different sets of problems and I need to know which one I’m working on today. Our relationship going up and down like a roller coaster was making my trauma bond feel like dopamine and depression in a continuing cycle because I could not achieve homeostasis. I don’t have a crush that’s out of control.
I never have.
What I need is more e-mails like this one, that recognize we both participated. We both need to adjust to each other and get with the program. The clue phone is ringing in terms of where we need to go to be stable and happy. Those options are two extremes, because it’s not child’s play. It’s the nature of our friendship/relationship in this thing we’ve created and managed.
Here’s what I know. When she’s really taking it in, she’s doing everything in the most wonderful way she knows how. It’s when she stops listening that there’s a problem. Here’s what I mean. She really saw me. She saw how much it bothered me for her not to call it a friendship or a relationship because it doesn’t honor what we’ve actually been through. It minimizes it to an enormous degree.
It’s the thing that proves to me that Michael and I aren’t the only ones who will come, because she loves her girl, too.
The small things are the big things.
Because I have a hard out.
Stories That Are All True 