Muchness and Light

And if love is real, maybe I'm just too bad to remember how good it feels. My heart is still.

One of the things I like about the Internal Family Systems model is that it doesn’t pathologize any of the subpersonalities. Even when their behaviors are seemingly destructive, their dysfunction serves a greater purpose, at least in their minds. Their actions and reactions serve to protect the Exiles, to prevent further harm from coming to the already damaged parts of the psyche.

When I am hurt or sad, and usually in response to infliction of hurt by someone else (and usually a romantic partner), one of my subpersonalities will fling terrible thoughts and words at me.

You’re fat. You’re ugly. You’re gross. You’re stupid. You are unlovable, and no one loves you. You aren’t worthy of love and don’t deserve good things. You are a waste.

Now, logically, I understand those things may not be true. But why the hell would part of me continually tell other parts of me that I’m a waste of human flesh?

For a while, I wasn’t even sure who she was. I thought it might be Stephie, but she’s more likely to inflict her anger on others, not on me. And this one’s voice is no one else’s. It’s not my mother’s or my father’s. It doesn’t belong to any number of exes. It is a strangely-pitched, younger, strange version of my own voice. She knows how to inflect dripping sarcasm, spitting hatefully at me when I’m in the worst of the throes of pain. And just when I can’t take more, she hits with a final sucker punch, spinning me deep into tears and frustration.

She’s Harley.

Yes, it’s an easy moniker. And if she does her job well, she can get Quinn to act out, to seek out comfort in dark places.

And all of this to protect some Exile.

But what’s her purpose? I’m already hurting like hell; what good does it to do to inflict more, albeit different, pain?

Well, my first reaction to hurt and sadness is to close it down, to wall it off where it can’t reach me. Rango complained more than once that I would turn icy when hurt and angry. I can become very mechanical and refuse to feel emotion, let alone express it.

And that’s what she does: Harley forces me to feel something, anything that keeps me from returning to a dissociative state of numbness.

I spent the first ten years of my sons’ lives in that space. Struggling to find value both within myself and reflected from my husband, I shut down. My anxiety after giving birth to Max was so great that I started a low-dose SSR. It stopped the anxiety and kept me in the center, so I stayed on it until I couldn’t bear not feeling anymore. While the wild swings from joy to sorrow were abated, I generally felt nothing. When I got nothing in return, I became frustrated, and Quinn stepped in to give me some semblance of meaning again.

But because I am drawn to emotionally-unavailable men, Harley does what she can to keep me from becoming an avoidant myself. Given the last few years and recent relationship troubles, I get the appeal of shutting everyone and everything out. I get how it can seem beneficial to artificially limit what you’re willing to feel for another person, who well might break your heart. There is safety in walling yourself off from the Great Outdoors.

But I’m also a firm believer that love matters. It matters when we feel deep, caring emotion for another person, no matter the context. I don’t mean infatuation or attraction or simple affection. I mean the kind of love in which we are willing to sacrifice to help them reach their next goal. The kind of love that is so simple and pure that it expects to be cared for in return, simply because that is its nature.

It is unimaginable to me to walk away from that. It makes no sense to me that the people who’ve said they loved me could then walk away, could turn their backs on the thing they need most, which I just happen to be willing to give in droves. It’s nonsensical to have what you want most, what is good and healthy and true, right in front of you and to drop it carelessly on the ground on your way out the door.

So, the hurt for me comes from both the act of abandonment, whether physical or emotional, and the injustice of the leaving. And emotional abandonment is a very large part of the hurt for me. Hiding deep inside is a little girl who felt abandoned. Every time she felt it was safe to come out, trust someone enough to hold their outstretched hand and hope for love, she was let down again, over and over. She continually learned that she wasn’t worth loving, because people who love you stay and support you and care for you. They sacrifice for you, and no one sacrificed for her. She was, at times, a sacrificial lamb of sorts.

So, when the same wounds are reopened, Harley steps in to keep me from shutting down entirely. She steels me for an onslaught of disappointment and confusion. If I can already feel badly about myself, the abandonment makes sense. If they leave, it is because I am unlovable, so it shouldn’t be so hurtful or saddening. Even if what I feel is disgustful pain, that’s still better than feeling nothing at all.

While I know the things she says to me aren’t always true, there is, of course a nugget of truth to everything she says. I regained weight. I became complacent about my health. I can see myself aging both in photographs and in the mirror. I am emotionally difficult, hence my return to therapy. And even when those faults seem natural and overblown in my mind, there are long stretches of time in which I’m unable to find more good than bad, unable to value myself as more than my faults.

Pandy and I had a wonderful Saturday recently. I took her to see my beloved Afghan Whigs for the first time. Even though I’d just seen them in Atlanta a few weeks before, I traveled to Birmingham for what turned out to be the best Whigs show I’ve ever seen.

 

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• 
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A few days later, she messaged me and asked me to look at the photographs she had taken of me that night. She asked me to see what she sees, what she was trying to capture, “joy, or strength, or tenacity reflected in you.”

You are exquisitely beautiful. I know you seldom feel the woman I see, but that doesn’t mean you are any less the one I see. Sometimes friends see us more clearly than we see ourselves. Those are the times we need to redirect our focus, and look with kinder eyes; look at yourself for a moment as I do. See yourself in my photographs of you, and imagine what I was trying to capture. I see beauty. I see sass. I see strength. I see might. In short I see a very real version of Wonder Woman. She is a woman I love, admire, and appreciate. She is you.

I looked at her photographs. I can see what it is that she sees, why those moments capture those qualities of the woman in the photographs. What I don’t see, is myself. I don’t connect to those women in those pictures. I don’t feel attached to or protective of them. I don’t feel that their beauty and strength and sass is my own. Because if I feel those things about myself, it will open the door to hurt. It will allow for the possibility of disappointment.

But no matter what I do, no matter how far I get from my own center, Pandy is there. She is with me through thick and thin, through skinny and fat, through aging and heartache and wonder. I love her, and she loves me. I know this. I feel it every day, even if I don’t talk to her. Even when I’ve been at my worst, she stayed and supported me and loved me anyway, even if it meant telling me truths I didn’t want to hear.

Sometimes Harley argues with Pandy. Sometimes she rolls her eyes and just lets her talk. But every so often, she stays still and lets me feel the love that comes from this woman who has no desire to ever abandon me.

Somehow, that is progress.

 

 

With their guilt and shame, they think they're to blame for Candyman.

I spent a lot of the last week or so listening to a couple of podcasts about Internal Family Systems, about how and why the personality becomes segmented and how it’s possible to reconnect with each subpersonality and integrate the segments with a healthy Self. Look, I know from the outside it seems like a ludicrous idea of having a fragmented personality, with slivers of varying sizes and abilities vying for opportunity to help the person manage and live their life. But what I also know is that what I was doing wasn’t working well. Making the opportunity to listen to my emotions as they come up, to hear and feel without recrimination what each offer and to mindfully consider that specific point of view, has been eye opening.

I can be mercurial. I can move quickly from one emotion to another, be blissfully joyous in a moment and then respond in an extreme flash to come perceived hurt or threat. In the IFS model, that is one subpart responding and then another. Sometimes they not only battle the world around me, they battle with one another. But each has a job. Each has specific skills and methods to protect and help me, even though they’re not always as effective or healthy as would be best. Because their abilities are limited by only select experience and memory, none has a full range of tools at their disposal, but they do the best they can.

One thing that kept coming up this week was the idea of triggers. The word “trigger” itself can be met with an eyeroll or irritation at its overuse in recent years, especially in pop journalism and often in regard to social justice issues. But emotional and psychological triggers are a real thing. [I’m no psychologist or neurobiologist, and my explanations and understandings here come as a paraphrased interpretation of what I have been learning in regard to my own work.] As I understand it, experience is processed by the body and through the mind’s eye, imprinted on the brain and maintained in the prefrontal cortex, which is sometimes referred to as the “mammalian” part of the brain because it controls less instinctual functions. However, when there is trauma, the memory is imprinted in the amygdala, or the “reptilian” brain. This part engages during stressful moments, when protection becomes instinctual. That angry, extreme outburst during an argument, when you just can’t disengage from the emotion and scream and say terrible things you might not mean when you’re calm—that comes from the amygdala. The brain thinks we’re under attack and chooses fight over flight.

Triggers are created in the amygdala. When some later situation occurs that feels similar to those memories, fight-or-flight is engaged again. Not only does the perception in the moment seem like a very real threat, memories of previous, similar moments seem like additional threats. Anxiety and agitation, even fear and panic, can ensue, and we do what we can to protect ourselves from those threats. Again, maybe we are able to disengage and flee the moment. Often, people who have experienced trauma will fight, sometimes in ways that seem bizarre or non-sensical, both to others and to themselves. Unless there is healing of the trauma, the hurt can be triggered over and over. Without healing, the hurt is continually reinflicted—at least it seems that way to the brain—and the damage is deepened every time it’s reopened.

In the same way scars serve to protect a vulnerable space that has been damaged, the subparts of personality that are born of trauma act as protectors. In some ways, they are psychic scars, doing their best to heal a hurt and keep it from causing more pain, closing a wound to keep it from festering. But sometimes the scar tissue itself causes problems, sensitive from nerves that didn’t heal fully and pulling against healthy tissue painfully. When something in a moment triggers a traumatic memory, the subparts work to soothe the pain. They’ll twist and turn to pull the person away from hurt—like an emotional flinch—or they’ll engage it fully to stop the hurt from happening at all—swatting away an insect that is about to sting or bite. Born in the amygdala, the subpersonalities function instinctually, often without our conscious knowledge of how they work.

The goal of IFS, and currently my own therapeutic goal, is to identify and connect with each subpersonality, to understand its specific functions and motivations, and to teach it healthier ways to function, eventually allowing for an integrated, healthy Self. This is not the extremity of The United State of Tara or Sybil. There may be days in which it seems like I’m living The Three Faces of Stephanie, but I don’t have a dozen extreme personalities trapped inside me, fighting to get out. Not like that.

But taking the time to listen for them and hear what they say, breathing through an emotion or moment of extreme thought and examining how that connects to my Self, has been both wonderful and emotionally draining. I’ve been able to be less reactionary to some pretty difficult situations. I’ve reined in anger and avoided unnecessary outburst. I handled some particularly stressful engagements with some exes quite calmly and healthfully.

I also spoke about my molestation this week, verbalizing and articulating the logistics of my sexual abuse in ways I never have. It took 40 years for me to feel safe enough to say out loud specifically what had happened (at least in part). It was frightening, conjuring those memories into my present, feeling like adult Stephanie was watching them happen while simultaneously feeling what Cissie felt in those moments. I am incredibly thankful to have an amazing therapist who I (we) trust enough to ask her to help me with those feelings.

That night, I remembered a dream I had when I was very young, maybe 3 or 4. I’ve always remembered the dream, a nightmare that terrified me. Because of that dream, I fell asleep with the lights on until I was a teenager. I still tend to sleep with my blankets drawn tightly up around my neck because of it. While it would sound innocuous and maybe even silly to describe it now, I realized it was taken from what was happening around me while I was being molested. It was the distraction from what was happening, and my tiny, young subconscious turned it into a nightmare that haunted me for a decade.

There was no sudden healing that came with this realization. But there was connection with that part. There was understanding that allowed me to connect with Cissie, who was the target of the earliest trauma. To understand her is to show her that I can be trusted, that I will protect her and love her, no matter what, that I am a capable adult who can handle it for all of us. She doesn’t have to be left in the care of teenaged babysitters with their limited knowledge and capabilities.

I have spent years in a constant state of fight-or-flight, hypersensitive to perceived threat. Sometimes those perceptions have been wrong, and I have misinterpreted experience through the filters of my own agitation. Sometimes the voices of those subparts have chattered and whispered chaotically, warning me of what they see, and I have accepted their perceptions as truth. They’re not always wrong. They are, however, always singular and myopic in what they can see from their standpoint in the past.

There will be people who feel discomfited reading this. My words will make some people uncomfortable. At times, they make me uncomfortable. But the secrecy and shame that came with sexual trauma should never have been mine. Cissie should never have felt afraid and ashamed by what was done to her, without her consent and without her love. Stephie and Quinn should never have felt the need to protect her. While I have created a façade of transformation over the last seven years, there has still been a constant turmoil inside of me. The discomfort of a reader can never compare to the discomfort I have felt inside for my entire life.

I will not hide behind someone else’s shame again.

 

 

Though you drown in good intentions, you will never quench the fire. You'll give in to your desire, when the stranger comes along.

Break-ups can be foundationally shattering. The end of a long-term relationship can be shocking to the core. There is the grief that comes from severing a deep, meaningful connection, of lamenting what has been lost, but there is also a sudden shift in daily routines that now feel hollow and future plans that will never come to fruition.

The day after Rango came to get his stuff from the house, I struggled just to maintain. I woke early, fed the cats, and cried for a while before falling back asleep. At noon, I realized I needed to get up and do my normal Sunday chores. The boys would be home from their dad’s that evening, and they would be expecting clean laundry and food for the week.

Walking through the grocery store, I felt raw. I felt like everyone who passed me in the aisles could see the sadness dripping from my every pore. I was certain that my hard-fought composure would come undone if anyone spoke kindly or smiled at me.

It’s not just that the sadness is a part of the grieving process. The sadness fulfills a purpose.

When I realized the futility of the relationship, I started looking for a new therapist. Therapy had been incredibly helpful through the demise of my marriage to DH. I was fortunate to have found an incredible therapeutic partner to help guide me through a couple of years of divorce and dating and loss. But my insecurities undoubtedly played a role in the tensions and break-up with Rango, and I knew I never want to feel those things again. I never again want to feel so easily broken by another person, especially when my head knows it shouldn’t be possible.

As I did some research online, I came across the Internal Family Systems therapeutic model developed by Richard C. Schwartz in the 1980s. It seemed to be especially effective in treating anxious attachers and rejection sensitivity. The idea is that we are each a Self, which is the true, whole, spiritual center of us. But we also have these discrete subpersonalities with their own intentions and needs and quirks and purpose. Each part has a specific viewpoint, developed from its interpretations of life experiences. Each has its own memories and interprets them according to its unique perspective:

• Managers handle the way we interact with the external world. They try to protect us from hurt, whether from others or from our own memories.
• Exiles are the parts that feel the worst emotions—pain, hurt, shame, fear—usually resulting from childhood trauma. Managers and Firefighters try to exile these parts to prevent their emotions from coming to the surface.
• Firefighters show up when Exiles break free and demand attention. They try to distract us from the pain, often encouraging unhealthy behaviors as coping mechanisms.

The goal of IFS is to allow the Self to access and connect to each subpart, healing them one by one. Thus, the Self leads the other parts in harmony and health. We become a whole, heathy person, rather than an amalgam of these smaller bits that exhaust themselves fighting to maintain a losing battle.

I have long believed that we each are made up of various persona, and we take them out and show ourselves when everyone has gone….

In an online interview reposted through the band’s Facebook page, Alex Wheeler said the title, Persona Non Grata, referred to all of the unacceptable and unwelcomed parts of everyone—the lurid, the shadowy, the hidden, the broken.

“Each of us has a persona, all the time,” he said. “I’m one persona with the band, someone a little different with my fans, someone else entirely with my wife and daughter. Sometimes that persona is ‘good’ and sometimes it’s ‘bad’. I spent a lot of time exploring the bad sides of normal, everyday people, you know? Not serial killers or rapists or anything. I wanted to look at the things regular people like to hide from the people they know and, most especially, from themselves.”

                                                                                                                                Persona Non Grata (2012)

I have, at times, named some of my subpersonalities, though I wasn’t thinking of them within the context of IFS.

• Cissie is the sweet, blond girl who never seemed to be pleasing to her parents, no matter how hard she tried. She never felt like she was enough. She was also molested for years, and she spent a lot of her time agitated and afraid. She is an Exile.
• Quinn is the rebellious teen who learned to trade sex and secrets for affection, often in an attempt to protect Cissie. She has her own anger and hurt, but she will bear it all to protect that little girl. She is a Firefighter.
• Stephie is a loud ball of angry. She will erupt and tantrum and demand her way when she feels she is being ignored. She is potentially a special subpersonality called a Tormentor. (She secretly wears that like a badge of honor.)
• Sassafras Bombalurina O’Malley is the one who reminds me to be shiny and sparkly and to tell the world to go fuck itself if it doesn’t like it. She is an eccentric, outrageous Manager who knows how to call on the Firefighters to back her up.
• Wonder Woman is the Amazonian princess who does it all, because she has to. She handles the day-to-day business of life, and she is remarkable. She is strong and capable, smart and intuitive, and she can predict everyone else’s needs and desires before they can. She is a Manager.
• Stephanie Quinn Jackson is the writer who sees it all, who arranges it and espouses the shared perspective of the others, who bears witness to it all and gives them a voice when it seems that no one else will listen. She is a Manager.

There are others, nameless but all with some variation of my face. Each has its own role and purpose in getting Stephanie through her life. Not to be confused with Dissociative Identity Disorder, I am not claiming to have multiple, distinct personalities. These are simply facets of my personality, and each strives in its own way to help me be secure and healthy and safe—even when its influence result in dysfunction.

The sadness is tied up with the hurt, and it’s not just from this break-up. This is hurt that hasn’t healed in 40 years. This is sadness that helps me to keep others at bay, or to curl up in bed and sleep when I should be doing productive things, so that I don’t have to feel the hurt. So I don’t have to delve back into every haunting memory and question again why I was both too little and too much. Why I wasn’t worth careful, healthy love.

None of these parts can or should ever be exorcised. Each is valuable and necessary, both as its own part and as a part of the larger whole. But the hurt can be healed enough so that it doesn’t make more hurt, create more sadness, because somewhere in there is joy and beauty. Somewhere in there is a sad and lost little girl who desperately wants to be loved.

I have to find her and help her.

We have to find her together.

 

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Muchness and Light - But if you'd known how that would sound to me, you would've taken it back and boxed it up and buried it in the ground.

Ain't these tears in my eyes telling you.

Let's have a disco ball, and let's be happy.

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Underneath my lucid skin, the cold is lost, forgotten.

During an ongoing conversation with a friend about happiness, I asked him what it is in his life that keeps him from being happy.

“What does this elusive happiness look like? What do you believe will bring that happiness? How will it manifest—will you find it, will it find you, or will you make it? What are you struggling against, that you feel is keeping happy away for more than short bursts? What are you willing to change or eliminate in order to make room for this happiness?”

Of course, this banter comes on the heels of my own burst of unhappy this weekend. I have been frustrated that life isn’t necessarily how I want it to be. Since DH moved out of state two years ago, he has had very little interaction with the boys. Phone calls and email have been sparse, and visitation totaled 28 days in that two-year span. (Though I am happy that he has been making a much more concerted effort to rectify that, as of late. <fingers crossed>)

That has left me with very little time in which to connect with myself on my terms. His absence coincided with my starting college and work, so I have lived in the constant pace of mom and student and employee. Constrained by obligation and time and money, I have had to forego a lot of the time to be “free” I’d previously had when the boys were with their father.

Because the boys were getting older and more self-sufficient, I’d been able to take some time away from them, a few hours for class or work or the occasional (bad) date. Then I met Rango.

“Wow,” he said during our first date, “with so much going on, how do you find time to date?”

“If it’s important to me, I will make time for it,” I replied.

Eventually—especially once GOAL was added to my plate—I started to butt up against real limitations. There are only so many hours in a day in which to accomplish what needs to happen in our life. I had to make serious adjustments.

Of course one of the first things to go was working out. If the exhaustion isn’t enough to drop me in bed by 9:00, household chores or schoolwork keep me busy. Now that I’m at Mercer in a program for working adults, my day starts at 6:00 a.m. and often doesn’t end until class lets out sometime after 10:00 p.m.—plus the drive home and the unwinding before I can even sleep before I get up and do it again. Having the boys for nearly 100% of the year also added substantial additional cost; it turns out teenage boys eat a lot, and their school/social activities are time-consuming and expensive.

This week, again, Facebook popped up with my “memories”—pictures from that day in years past. This time it was from a specific night three years ago with Pandy. I looked at the picture and thought, “I miss my purple hair. And I miss my collarbones.”

Toward the end of my marriage, I rebelled against the domesticity I’d created. I felt trapped and struggled to find meaning or purpose that didn’t stem directly from my role as wife and mother. Never happy in the medium, I swung the pendulum so far in the other direction that it, at times, wreaked havoc on my life.

So while I desperately miss the freedoms that come with fully embracing the Sassafras O’Malley persona, I am also careful to remember the confusion and static and sheer craziness that often came with that liberty. Sassafras has a tendency to be where she probably shouldn’t be.

Right now I’m living the life I need to be living: working full time, taking care of and providing for my children, going to school more than half time in order to finish as quickly as possible, succeeding by everyone’s metrics, including mine. And I have the support of a life partner who helps with as much as he can.

But sometimes, I still feel unhappy.

While doing homework over the weekend, I read a quote by Simone de Beauvoir: “Those who are condemned to stagnation are often pronounced happy on the pretext that happiness consists in being at rest.”

Because I’m not able to do what I want, when I want, I often feel stagnant. I feel trapped by circumstance that’s changing far slower than I would like, given my incredibly impatient nature. Sometimes I feel resentful when that circumstance is to blame for the lack of freedom and the feeling of stagnation. And it doesn’t matter that my head knows better; my gut is screaming that it feels wrong, that it feels too much like my life before, and my heart gets angry.

When I feel those emotions, I have choices in how to react. I can scream and go off my fucking rails, which very people have ever seen. For everything I have experienced with Rango, he has never been witness to a full-fledge Stephie Meltdown. I can choose to hold it all in and just pretend it’s not there, cycling slowly through more resentful. Or I can feel it and acknowledge it and let it go.

Knowing myself the way I do, I usually choose the latter, but Rango called me out on my methodologies. He complained that I become cold and distant, obviously struggling with some emotion that I refuse to let escape the icy surface. He’s right. I eventually found that the quickest way out of my own head was to jump in, dropping into it as quickly as possible, and then use that downward momentum to push off the inevitable bottom, letting the pressure release as I rise back to the top in a stream of my own bubbles.

But as long as I feel like there are things missing or that I am bound by circumstance, I will still have moments of discontent. I will still have impetus to feel unhappy at times.

Maybe happy isn’t the goal. My former therapist told me once that happiness is a fleeting emotion and that content is likely the healthier alternative I am most likely to feel content when I am living my life on my own terms, in my own way and at my own pace. But because I have relationships with other people, especially those three men who live in my house, I am morally obligated to take their contentment into consideration as well. What I want is sometimes in conflict with what they need.

So for now, I’m trying to make the best of it. I’m trying to make those small changes I talk about in my GOAL speeches, to pick up the pieces I keep dropping and put them together in the ever-expanding mosaic that makes up my disco ball. For once in my life, I’m thankful to have these big hands that let me hold more than seems possible.

 

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Simone de Beauvoir

Let's have a disco ball, and let's be happy.

Ain't these tears in my eyes telling you.

 

You'll not see nothing like the mighty Quinn.

As I was turning 14, I made the decision to leave behind my schoolmates and the few friends I'd managed to make, opting to go to the smaller, alternative magnet high school.  I'd always been an outsider—the strange, poor girl who transferred into the upper-middle-class school where she could be guaranteed the gifted education her test scores demanded. 

In elementary school, I never had classmates who came to sleep over at my house.  My parents and I lived in a trailer two doors from my paternal grandparents, seven miles from the edges of the other school's district.  Occasionally I would be invited to a birthday party or sleepover at a classmate's house, but it always felt strange, like I was included because someone's mother made it that way. 

Junior high was better but only just a little.  I had a few close friends, and my happiest memories of that time almost all involve being at someone else's house.  My friend, Kelly, and her parents never failed to include me in their life, week after week of Saturday sleepovers and Sunday church and family dinners.  Kelly's home was warm and inviting, especially as I was surviving my own parents' divorce. 

I was abandoning the young girl persona of Cissie, but who was I becoming?  Adolescence is a terribly unsettling time, the shift from child to adult.  Confusion and disorientation are rampant, and I was especially susceptible to that.  The gifted high school, RLC, seemed like an opportunity to break entirely from Cissie and the painful memories of growing up different.  The school had its own unique history of being a safe haven for outcasts, a defiant eye-sore of a building in a suburban slum, and the students and teachers were unlike anything I'd experienced growing up in the White Flight safety of mid-80s Bluff Park, Alabama. 

RLC was the place that I became not just Stephanie, but Stephanie Quinn.

 

Quinn - Age 15 or 16

 

 

For a while in the 1980s, monogramed sweaters were all the rage.  I can remember desperately wanting a crewneck one in turquoise, my SKQ initials elaborately adorning the wool blend. 

"They don't do a Q," my mother explained.

I scanned the Sears catalog, looking at the choices of color and style, wistful for the tightly-woven threads that sheened the flourishing embellishment of "Diane Elizabeth Jones" or "Roger Adam Smith".  Q and X and Z just weren't options, so I never had a monogrammed anything. 

By the time I graduated high school in 1990, I had been the only Q-named student ever to attend RLC. 

I was not like other girls.

Looking back, I realize that my habit and joy of finding jellicle names started in my own childhood but certainly continued in my teens.  Budgie and Tomato Butt know who they are, and Tomato Butt began to call me "The Mighty Quinn". 

Who was Quinn?  She was different, even by the strange standards of the socially awkward, creative group she lived and thrived in.  She was tall and big and loud and awkward.  She was a slacker who found it easier to not do something that was hard, because dropping from the lower branches meant a faster, softer landing than crashing from the top of the tree. 

Where Cissie had tried her best to be a good girl, Quinn plainly said, "Fuck that!" and began to demand that life be on her terms.  If anyone expected anything of her, she would go out of her way to do the opposite.  She was openly defiant and disagreeable and rebellious.  She was sneaky and manipulative and mostly learned how not to get caught. 

Because Cissie hadn't gotten the attention and care that she so craved even when she was a good girl, Quinn learned that a gut-wrenching, lung-wailing tantrum could bring about attention.  Bad attention was better than no attention, so she worked with what came easy to her. 

Early in my freshman year, I met a guy at school.  He was a senior.  He never had a jellicle name, though I'll call him Jack for ease of use.  Jack and I were friends immediately.  We spent long hours on the telephone almost every night, talking about everything and nothing.  He would play his guitar in the background while we talked or watched TV or while I did my homework.  When I would argue with my mom, he would talk me down.  When DH and I broke up in that stupid high school way, Jack spent weeks and months letting me talk through it all.  Sometimes I would hear about the girl he'd gone out with over the weekend. 

We hung out some at school, though far less than seems likely given the nature of our relationship.  We kind of made out once, on the third floor hall during our shared free period.  There was no kiss, but my French teacher stopped to talk to us while we snuggled against the painted cinderblock wall near the stairs.  She had no idea that my baggy sweatshirt was hiding his hands on my boobs. 

And Jack and I never failed to tell each other that we loved each other.  I can remember the first time we did, on the telephone while he was at his house and I was at Karolina's.  It was just sort of said after a strange, rough night at the mall, and we continued that tradition for the length of our relationship. 

Jack was also the first person I ever told about my molestation.  He was the first safe place I'd ever known, and then he graduated and went to college.  I have the strange memory of Jack calling me from college moments after my molester tried to grope me for the last time.  I cried, hysterical and broken, explaining that I'd just told the man never to touch me again or I would kill him.  Jack listened patiently and soothed me through it.

When he first left, I missed him but was okay.  We would keep in touch through letters and then the occasional phone call.  (Long distance was expensive in those days.)  Eventually—and some of this is totally skewed by hindsight—I didn't fully understand that I missed him and why I missed him.  I became petulant and argumentative.  There was a nasty exchange of harsh, sometimes vitriolic letters, and then our friendship was dead. 

Eventually I started dating Damien.  The two of them had actually known each other in high school but hadn't had contact in several years.  Damien was loud and gregarious and pushy and funny and strangely charming.  He would call me, while he was dating another friend of mine, and talk for hours, about everything and nothing.  He would play his guitar in the background while we talked and watched TV or while I did my homework. 

Jack warned me not to get involved with Damien, months after our own relationship had passed the point of disintegration.  I specifically chose to date Damien because Jack had told me not to.

Damien goes on to be a tempestuous, on-again/off-again four years of utter Hell.  He was verbally and emotionally and physically abusive.  He was the catalyst for a couple of half-hearted suicide attempts.  He was the intentional, malicious cause of some serious self-harm.   

DH returns to my life.  Twenty years later, I'm cycling through a series of bad relationships with unavailable men.  I'm intently examining my history, unearthing any clue as the what and how and why things went wrong, so that I can at least have the potential to move forward in a healthy, fulfilling relationship. 

This morning, it hit me: I am continually recreating this relationship with Jack. 

Quinn smacked me upside the skull with a derisive, "Duh!"

Hell, Damien and Bounder were even physically built like Jack, and Absolem's hands always reminded me of Jack's.  Interestingly, DH and Jack knew each other, as well, and there was never any love lost between the two of them.

Time and again, I am drawn to creative, smart, funny, unordinary, passionate men.  Men who love music (including a couple of musicians).  Men who can talk to me for hours and meet my need of quality conversation.  Men who don't always have a lot to do with me away from that venue.  Men who hide me and sometimes deny me and the impact I have on their hearts. 

I have never once had an initial exchange of I-love-yous face to face.  I've never had the experience of seeing the look on a man's face when he tells me that for the first time, of being able to look him in the eye when I say it as well.  It has always come over the phone.  Once, it was even in a text. 

For months, I have been angry as hell that, to the best of my knowledge, Bounder never told another living soul that he loved me.  Absolem certainly didn't.  Neither did Katniss. 

And so even Quinn became a secret.  She learned to trade men's secrets and deepest, darkest truths for their affection.  For their love.  For sex.  As long as it was quiet. 

The Mighty Quinn, who has the power to make the crazy better, to return the frazzled to restful normal.  Who knows better how to deal with cold and dark than Quinn the Eskimo?

During the final bench trial for my divorce, the judge asked if I wanted to keep my married name or go back to my maiden.  I knew from experience that it's much easier with schools and friends and the like, when a mother's last name matches her young children's.  I'd also fully established my writing persona as Stephanie Quinn Jackson. 

But I have gravitated over the last few months toward images of Qs.  Initially I saw them as magnifying glasses, as a tool for closer examination.  Then I began to associate them with questions, with my own inner searching.  Lately they've felt more like a reclamation of who I was before DH. 

Today, I see all of that as valid.  I also see her, the 17-year-old girl who wants to make sure I hear what she has to say, who wants to make sure her valiance wasn't in vain.  She wants to make sure I know Jack.

So, Quinn, you crazy nut, I hear you.  I love you, and I thank you for poking me hard enough to make me finally notice the puzzle piece that's been upside-down and sideways for 25 years.  Now take your self-satisfied smirk and go take a nap.  You deserve it. 

 

Getting bigger and brighter, wider and lighter.

The girls and I have agreed for ages that Growler's husband, BC, is an über-Alpha male.  In any given situation or room of people, he will quietly take control and direct almost everything that happens.  I'm sure he has moments when he can be an utter ass about it, but I've never really seen that aspect of him.  Granted, I don't live with the man.  However, I have spent a lot of time with him and in their home. 

"Alpha Male Traits" on AskMen.com outlines some basics, from the book Men 2.0 Engineering the Alpha: A Real World Guide to an Unreal Life by Adam Bornstein and John Romaniello:

"You see, to be an Alpha male in the traditional sense simply means the most dominant within a group, or the strongest in a group or the most confident in a group. Not a person who is necessarily strong or confident in the absolute sense; just someone who, in a given group of people, most outwardly projects strength or confidence. In other words, the problem with the definition of Alpha isn’t really the assumed aggression or implied cockiness; it’s the fact that the entire foundational principle for self-value is  comparative analysis."

They outline seven characteristics of the new Alpha:

1)      helpful but not condescending

2)      confident but not cocky

3)      vain but not conceited

4)      prideful but not arrogant

5)      humble but not self-loathing

6)      tolerant but not weak

7)      dedicated but not obsessed

After Bounder and I broke up, Growler finally confided that BC never quite thought Bounder was the right match for me.  I trust BC's instincts for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that he's a Fragile Cat.  Like Bounder.  And like me. 

"I don't date by committee," I said to him, meaning the girls (a.k.a. The Castration Committee), "but I'm not dating anyone from now on until they get your stamp of approval."

He laughed and agreed.

And then it hit me: BC is the Lion King.  We are part of his pride.

Let me be very, very clear that there is absolutely nothing untoward or lascivious in my relationship with BC.  He and Growler and I all know this.  Where she is part of my girlie heart, he is an extension of that and has become a very good friend to me over the last few months.  I can only hope I am responsibly reciprocal in that friendship.

Growler laughed when I called him Mufasa, but we talked at length about this concept of his protecting the women (and even some of the men) in his life and how they all care for him in return. 

I need that in my ideal mate, I thought.  Those are the traits I'm seeking.

But then it hit me again: I have those traits. 

Even though I wasn't always cultivating or fully utilizing them, they're part of my make-up. 

And then I wrote on a piece of paper, which I showed to Growler:

I am an Alpha Female looking for an Alpha Male.

"Of course you're looking for an alpha male," she laughed.  "Did you not know this?"

I shook my head, eyes wide.  "I knew that.  I didn't know—"

"You didn't know you're an Alpha female??  Honey, do you hear this?"

BC and Growler laughed and laughed, watching me enveloped by this epiphany.  I called Hot Pocket that afternoon and told her; she laughed uproariously.

"Tank [her husband] and I have talked about that a hundred times.  Did you really not know?"

Nope.

It all suddenly made sense, the ways in which I am strangely not like other girls. 

1)      incredibly loyal but sometimes self-sacrificing

2)      well-aware of my abilities but sometimes disabled by my weaknesses

3)      knowing I had damn good hair but absolutely no concept that I was pretty

4)      proud of my accomplishments though I rarely see that they amount to anything

5)      jokingly self-deprecating, sometimes to the point of dire self-criticism

6)      intensely interested in people and how they work but incredibly impatient

7)      dogged and obsessive but only about the things that are important to me

I am loud and boisterous and full-on energy, most of the time.  I am relentless but with dimples instead of a grimace.  I am a glittery ball of blond batshit who can be so insecure that she ends up fetal and crying on her own floor because no one would talk to her when she went out.  I complain that men don't talk to me in public but know damn well that I can be aloof.  They tell me I'm intimidating, but I never really understood why. 

Now I get it. 

In that competition of love and sex, it's all about who's better than whom.  Who's stronger, prettier, sexier, smarter, blahblahblah.  Women compete against each other and themselves, just as men do.  The genders also compete against each other for placement in the immediate pack.  It's not always this way, certainly, but watch what happens in a crowded bar on any given weekend night. 

I am an Alpha.

I tend to attract strong personalities.  Even Bounder once said that any man who was going to even try to approach me had better bring the big stones.  When I am approached, I tend to shoot men down pretty quickly.  It doesn't take me long to size them up and know which ones could never be enough for me and my exacting standards. 

All of my talk this year of what I wanted in a relationship points to this über-Alpha male.  All of my work for the last three years has brought me the realization that I am looking for the biggest of the Cats.  My insecurities have source in my not seeing the plain truth of myself, yet again. 

All of the monument-worthy men in my past have been Fragile Cats, certainly.  They were possibly higher ranked than I was at some point.  The moment when that shifted is the tension point that ultimately led to the demise of those relationships.  When there was no other option but subjugating my own power to please them, the relationships fell the fuck apart. 

And the ones who said they didn't deserve me, that I was too good for them, they were right.  I lowered myself to their standards in order to compete with them, hence the turmoil.  (It really was you and not me.)

Being who I am, I could see their potential.  Even if they weren't living up to what I saw, I would remind them that they could be better and more special and that I would support that in any way I could, sometimes to my own detriment.  What I realize now is that I don't just need huge potential in a partner; I need a partner who is achieving his potential.

This also means that I have to work toward my own potential.  It may not be what anyone else sees in me, but I have to be very honest with myself about both what I want to do and what I really can do.  The last year of life on my own has shown me an enormous amount of untapped possibility, and now it's time to work that. 

But I won't do it to make anyone else happy or comfortable.  I won't spend my time fighting with someone else about why and how it could be better.  I will be who I am, who I can be in my own, huge heart, and that will be exactly right for me.  If it also happens to be right for them, so be it. 

Either way, it's not my problem.

 

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I don't want good, and I don't want good enough. I want "can't sleep, can't breathe without your love."

Are you An Alpha Female...

A case for the "Alpha Female"

Someday when my crying is done, I'm gonna wear a smile and walk in the sun.

For months I've been toying with what to write next. 

I always knew I wanted to do something else from the Junkture stories.  I went to Mardi gras and Mobile earlier this year to do research for the next book, Mantissa.  (That's Alex Wheeler's first wife's backstory, if you're interested.  If you don't know who I'm talking about, read my first novel Persona Non Grata.)  Most of it would be totally fiction with bits and pieces of my youth and stories from friends' lives as well. 

There's also the story of Talia Wheeler, Alex's current wife.  Sequentially it happens just after Persona Non Grata but is told from Talia's point of view.  I knew a lot of it would reflect my real life in the aftermath of separation and the process of divorce.  I haven't had enough closure or distance to be able to delve into it quite yet.

I had a dream in the spring that was the catalyst for an entirely new story.  The details were swirling in my head, and I did hours and hours of research.  While utterly fiction and having nothing to do with Junkture, the tempest that is Sass and Bounder was strongly influencing how these characters were evolving.  This was true the first time we were together and even moreso the second time. 

I was stuck, though.  I couldn't quite see these new characters.  Queen Frostine was asking me regularly where this book was—she knew the gist of the story and wanted to see it come to fruition.  Even Hammer was intrigued by the idea. 

"It's all in my head," I would answer.

When Bounder and I broke up in July, I was on my way to Mobile again.  I needed time to think and wrap my head around what was happening.  The day after it finally happened, I drove out to Dauphin Island.  I sat on a mostly-deserted beach in the rain, listened to music, and cried.  I purged a lot of emotion that day, giving it to the wind and the rain and the withdrawing tide. 

And somehow over that tempest, I heard the names of the new characters.  Layla and Michael. 

From that point, they had identities.  I could hear and see them, knew how they acted and moved.  I borrowed Lady Hammer's laptop and wrote what would become the first draft of the first chapter on Sunday.  It took a few days, but I eventually got into the groove and the energy needed to write this story.

Like all writers do, I'm writing what I know.  Even though the story itself borders on paranormal romance (but is as about as genre-specific as PNG—which is to say, not at all), the emotions of Michael and Layla are effectively Bounder and me.  Like I did for the first book, and like I do for Muchness and Light, I am drawing upon my very real life to drive my writing. 

But just once I would like to not have to live a traumatic relationship just to get a book out of me. 

"Most women gain twenty-five pounds when they break up," my editor said.  "I'd say emotional writing is much more productive."

I agree, but it's hard to relive the good and the bad just to reframe the sense of emotion.  It's hard to see the texts and emails and then remember what was occurring in the midst of that.  It's as difficult to the middle-of-the-night "I miss and love you" messages as it is to see the "This is too hard, I don't think I can do it" ones.  It breaks my heart all over again to see all the times we were messaging simultaneously that we were listening to the same song, or to see when he'd text me that he was on his way to come and kiss his girl. 

In some ways, it leaves me even more confused about what happened.  He was there, plainly and constantly, and then suddenly not.  I knew when and why I think it happened, but I don't know how.  It seems like there was literally one moment in time when something shifted and everything fell apart.  If I mapped it out on a storyline, I can see the day that's pinpointed as the climactic turning point.  But there are still details I'm missing. 

I have to accept that I may never have that insight.  Writing Original Sin is kind of my way of making sense of it all, though our specifics are differently complicated than Michael and Layla's.  I get to build the monument to this as I see fit. 

"This is what your lightning strike was for," Hot Pocket said. 

She's probably right.  And I will take the lessons I learned from writing Persona Non Grata—step out of chronology, limit the emotional punch, break down the specifics to only what you need—and write this story as best I can.  The energy for it is abundant right now, and I'm let it flow openly and unabashedly.  If it's anything like my actual relationship with Bounder, it will come quickly and then be gone, leaving something entirely new in its wake. 

Love me or leave me. Just take it or leave it.

How do you define yourself?

I am the Glamazon—the six-foot blonde (okay, 5'11) with a surgically-enhanced body who loves to sparkle in heels and shiny lip gloss.  I am the Glitter Slug, who leaves a slow trail of spangles behind her wherever she goes.  Several times lately I've made reference to myself with a very colorful, publicly-inappropriate characterization that includes the words "batshit" and "beast".

Growler called me out on it, to listen carefully to what I was saying about myself, both to others and to me. 

"Is that all that you are?" she asked.

I am a mother, a writer, an ex-wife.  I'm a friend, a confidante, a lover.  Sometimes I am an enemy and a source of vexation and misery, both from my own perspective and from others'.  And sometimes I am a raging fucking bitch.

At any given moment, all of those things are true.  Who I am is relative to when I am, as well as to whoever is on the receiving end of my energy. 

With the boys, I am perpetually the mother, though sometimes I am the enemy.  With my parents, I am always the daughter, though I am also sometimes still just the child.  With my friends, I am a strange mix of mother and daughter and ex-wife and friend and confidante, all wrapped up in a big, glittery bow. 

With men, though, I tend to be the Golden Kitten (see Persona Non Grata for the full definition) and rely heavily on my sexuality as a defining characteristic.  Honestly, it's hard to miss and garners both attention and acclaim, though sometimes to my own detriment.  I am consistently a flirt but am generally very capable of staying distant from unwanted attention.  When I want the attention, though, that is when the beast blinks her long lashes and licks her bright, shiny lips in anticipation—both theirs and mine.  I am very adept at using my charms to get a man's attention, as well as to keep it if I think it's waning. 

There's an aftermath of letdown that can come from that, though.  The initial rush of lust may ebb quickly, especially if I become bored.  If I find a man to be uninteresting or substantially less intelligent than I, I will back away almost sadly; to have put the energy into it just to be disappointed—in another person or in my own judgment—feels fruitless.  I know in my head that there's something to be learned in those exchanges, no matter how brief, but it still can feel like a waste of my damn time. 

Sometimes I am just a mess.  I can be a petulant, little brat.  I can have moments when I dismiss all of the lessons I've learned and just screw the fuck up. 

All of these definitions of me depend on the moment in my day, in my life, and where I am or who is watching.  The people closest to me are able to see through the bullshit bravado and tell me the truth as they see it.  They are able to see me and to love me, no matter which me I am projecting.  Even when I am infuriating and loud and obsessive and bawdy, they know there are profound moments of quiet and sadness and deep, loyal love that are theirs for the taking—even when they don't ask.  But for me to willingly show those aspects of Stephanie to another person makes me the prey.  It makes me feel vulnerable, all Hunger Games style, like Katniss running toward the Cornucopia for everything she needs to survive. 

The best definition of me is made when all of those things come together, when the Golden Kitten can be still, curled up quietly while wearing little more than her glittery, pink heels.  It's a rare moment, truly, when the pretense can fall away, when I can feel safe and trusting enough to let my guard down and just love another person.  That is when I am most undeniably, most fiercely, and most extraordinarily Stephanie. 

 

Take my hand, let Fate decide.

Every so often, when you need it most but expect it least, the universe gives you a gift. 

Mine came three weeks ago, though it began with the unleashing of a torrent of anger and resentment directed at me that sent me curled into my bed for most of a day.  I seriously debated just staying between my cozy, flannel sheets for the weekend but decided at the last minute to go out, to get out of my battered head for a while.  I was supposed to be meeting up with a friend. 

That fell through at the last minute.  Instead what I got was a lightning strike, straight to the ass at 1:34 in the morning. 

Yes, it came in the form of a boy—no, a man—who could see me for who I really am.  And I could see him.  All within ten minutes. 

Once again, Fate intervened and turned my head to make me look at what it wanted me to see.

"What the fuck?" I asked myself.  "Did that just happen?"

Why, yes.  Yes, it did.

It's like the universe looked at all of the work I've done over the past three years, the lessons I fought so hard to learn through my crazy time of transformation, and said, "Okay.  Let's see what you do with this."

It's so plainly, painfully obvious that I have to practice what I preach with this.  I have to walk the talk.  So which lessons are most important now?

Don't hide yourself away.  I am a force of nature.  Hot Pocket said recently that even she has a hard time keeping up with me.  "It's like chasing a preschooler in the sunshine," she said.  "It's beautiful but exhausting sometimes."  I'm not offended by that, especially coming from a sister from another mister.  I know how I am.  But I hid much of that from myself and others for so long, and it almost destroyed me.  I have to be truthful to myself and let my inner disco ball shine brilliantly.  I seriously debated reining that in, to keep some of the glittery, blinding brilliance from him at least initially, afraid that I would overwhelm yet another man.  To be less than I am would be detrimental to me and wholly dishonest to him.  And any man who wouldn't want me to be completely Stephanie is exactly the kind of man I don't want in my life.  Turns out, he's not intimidated and barely even fazed by my muchness. 

Open your mouth and say what you want.  I'm not a little girl; I'm a grown-ass woman.  I have the right and responsibility to express my thoughts and desires to a potential partner.  No matter how in sync we may feel, he can't read my damn mind.  If I want him to know something, it's on me to make that clear.  Again, it seems less threatening to dance around an issue or to insinuate or imply.  That's a sure-fire way to foster the miscommunication that will eventually lead to distance and anger.  It's hard sometimes to let someone else into the cacophonous din of my head and my heart, and I have to at least offer to be their tour guide.  He not only understands why I am so open and forward—he appreciates it. 

Stay in the moment.  Oh, being still is the hardest for me.  I like a plan; I like to have expectations for the future.  Even if the best-laid plans go awry, I am flexible and resourceful enough to shift quickly to a new, diverging path.  But to be here, peacefully, is very difficult for me.  I don't know where this will be in six weeks or six months or six years, and every time my head tries to go to that place, I clamp down on those thoughts and tell myself to shut the fuck up.  He is here and now; that is where I will get to know him and where he will really get to know me.  And I find that, historically, when I've had a serious expectation of long-term, that's exactly the moment I begin to take my partner and that relationship for granted.  Anticipation of a lifetime or longer has often given me an excuse not to care for now, because my missteps can always be forgiven when there's an indefinite amount of time before me.  Now, with this man, I have to work to be present rather than projecting for a future.  My frenzied head has to give up control to my patient heart and let it lead me slowly toward whatever adventure awaits.

I realized this week that I spend so much time reacting to emotion—mine or someone else's—that I often forget to simply let myself feel what's happening, good or bad.  And what's happening, right now, feels spectacular.  He's amazing for reasons that would take me days to express, not the least of which is that he is totally accepting of my relationship with my girls.  Growler both unexpectedly met him ("That boy is dazzled, Stephanie.") and gave him his nickname (Bounder, which I will not explain in this forum).  Hot Pocket got the Tingle of Truthiness when I told her lightning had struck again.  Even Queen Frostine has given him her stamp of approval from a distance. 

In the way he always does, Hammer nailed me with the most honest appraisal of this point in my life: "You'll never feel normal again because your normal has changed.  This is great progress and I'm happy for you."

Me, too, Hammer.  Me, too.

You may think at first I'm mad as a hatter....

It started a year or two ago, the Nicknaming of the Inner Circle. 

I received a message from a friend, Amanda, who relayed the tale of a dream she'd had the night before, in which I was some kind of superheroine, fighting some crazy criminal villain while wearing a witchy purple dress and kickass black boots.  She was my sidekick. 

"We need names," I said.

As I thought about it all day, I kept going back to something she'd been calling me for days: sassy. 

"Sassafras," I decided. 

But Sass needed a last name.  Something Irish.  Something poignant. 

One of the songs I constantly go back to—even though one friend (Pickle) will ridicule me ad infinitum for this—is "Escape (The Pina Colada Song)" by Rupert Holmes.  It's tied to my childhood and my later youth and even my adulthood.  I have a Bucket List goal to get different, incredibly varied musicians to record an album that's nothing but covers of that song.  Adam Taylor and Wesley Cook have both agreed, in principle.  I'd love to get Les Claypool, Greg Dulli, and maybe In This Moment to record it, too.  I'd even happily donate all the proceeds to charity, though I have no idea what charity would want money from a song about two people trying to cheat on their spouses.  (Again, I argue, it's not about adultery; it's about serendipity!)

The bar where the two meet to plan their escape is O'Malley's.  Perfect.

So now Sassafras O'Malley needed a sidekick. 

I wracked my brain but could think of nothing.  She became Mandypants for lack of a better option.  And it stuck for a long while.  Recently after posting about a surgical procedure in which she was effectively microwaving her lady parts, I deemed her Hot Pocket.  And it suits her beautifully.

So Sassafras O'Malley and Mandypants (now Hot Pocket) were the first two of the nicknamed.  That list has grown and grown and grown since this began.  It seems silly, yes, but these nicknames are like our true names.  These are the second names, the names that are particular, peculiar, and more dignified, to help us keep our tails perpendicular.

Growler – who is sweet like a little kitten but will turn beastly in a moment if you cross her

Hammer – the Hammer of Honesty who can tell the truth like no one else

Moonshine – blue and bright and glowing, can always make you a little drunk with her beauty

Queen Frostine – the coolest chick you'll ever meet

Cookie – never a Tagalong and never a Thin Mint, but sweet and crunchy nonetheless

Lady Hammer – a strange female reflection of the truths of Hammer, totally unexpected

Glee – gregarious and ebullient, she knows the words to any and every song

Roadkill – who will step out in front of a moving car, admonishing you that they'll stop

Cupid37 – who dressed up as Cupid (and sometimes worse) in public and appears in chapter 37

Pickle – because he's always drunk, but also because he's both sweet and sour but not a baby gherkin

Irish Coffee/Not Boy – the Irish-descended guy I like to drink coffee with, who's not my boyfriend

Absolem – the questioning caterpillar to my Alice, who can unhinge me by asking me who I am

DH – Dear Husband, as assigned in the infertility forums 14 years ago, soon possibly DX or DXH or DB

Minizon - daughter of Hot Pocket, my Glamazon-in-training

There are a couple of others, but I don't know if they know the origins of their internal nicknames, so I'm opting to keep them in the vault.  For now.

Sometimes we have learned of our super powers.  Some are still a secret. 

Sassafras O'Malley, who can utterly mesmerize you with her potty mouth, has a special disco ball ring that dazzles stupid people into submission, specifically to keep them from copulating when her muchness leaks into the water supply.  It's a tool to lower the chances of stupid people breeding.  (She also has sparkly boots.) 

Growler has the ability to create snow angels anywhere, out of thin air.  She can mesmerize animals instantly and cause them to do her bidding. 

Hot Pocket has the Broccoli Bomb.  When she unleashes it, it makes everyone around her snort broccoli up the back of their noses.  Painfully funny. 

The list is likely to go on and on as time progresses.  I haven't named all of these people.  In fact, maybe only half of them.  Hammer has had a hand in the naming, as has Hot Pocket.  But these names are so appropriate for each and every one of these friends.  It's like they just whispered themselves to us in an inexplicable moment of truth.  Mostly when we were sober. 

They're my incomparable cast and crew. 

And these are the names that will never belong to another (fragile) cat.  They are ours and ours alone. 

But somewhere, deep down, each of also has a third name, the one that no other human can ever discover.  Our deep inscrutable singular names that only we know and only we call ourselves, respectively.  I know mine, but I'm not sharing.  Only one other person knows it, and that's only because he knew it before I did.  That's Absolem.  And I know he's not telling.