Muchness and Light

You know I thought you could. You know I thought you could, too.

When Bumblebee and I started 14 months ago, I was coming off a long series of bad relationships and encounters that had left me unsure I would ever be willing to date again. The logistics of a long-distance relationship might be insurmountable, but we both found something so special in the other that we were willing to try.

I was still going to therapy every week, grappling with how my past continued to influence my present, determining what was useful from more then 40 years of good and bad and what could be put away. But one of the things I was adamant about, from the very beginning, was that I could not be a secret. For me, secrecy is indicative of shame, of being told by a child molester that he loved me and that what we did was okay—but that everyone would blame me and be mad at me if they knew.

That dynamic played out time and again, specifically with men and sexual and emotional relationships. Sometimes it was their secret shame that hurt me, but usually it was my own. I learned to equate secrecy and dismissive hurt with love. It wasn’t until I ended my relationship with Rango in 2017 that I really decided to work to rewire that thinking.

And I was exceedingly clear with Bumblebee that I was not willing to take carry that weight in our relationship. Although he’d been separated from his wife for more than a year, he wanted to finalize his divorce before introducing me fully into his world. Fair enough. Like most people he knows, including our mutual friends, I knew nothing of his separation. He told me he was trying to finish it all before it became public. But the divorce was imminent. And he was adamant that he did not want anyone to cast me into some shadow of mistress.

So he said.

Look, my own divorce took far longer than I expected to finalize. Sometimes it be that way. But things with his kids and logistics got in our way. I pulled back but decided to give it another go. Then he was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive cancer, just before Christmas. All of our attention turned to his survival.

I was battling my own health issues, but I was back and forth from Atlanta to Birmingham to see him. We spent an inordinate number of nights holed up in a hotel, away from his supposed-to-be-temporary roommate and most other people. Occasionally we would spend a little time with my friends, as his energy allowed. Chemo gave way to surgery gave way to radiation. And when I was having regular dreams of being denied access to him after cancer surgery, he introduced me to his brother and then, albeit unexpectedly, to his parents, at the time of his surgery. I stayed at the hospital and at his parents’ home to help with his post-surgical recovery.

“I’m looking for the right time to tell the kids,” he said.

Two months later, he finally moved into is own space. He’d been delaying, he said, because he wanted to buy rather than to rent. Okay. But he suddenly relented and secured an apartment, telling me the divorce really was finally almost done. We talked of plans for my visiting him, working on grad school homework from his couch while helping him after more upcoming chemo.

And through it all, we had begun to navigate the idea that, when all four of our children were out of high school, we would have the option to move to the same location. He would talk of what we would do when we retired, how we would grow old together.

Except he still hadn’t told his teenage kids that I even existed. He still wasn’t comfortable with my telling my mom that we were dating, his having known her professionally before he ever knew me. And I was continually agitated by his social media, which was still filled with pictures of family nights and date nights with his long-estranged wife and maybe even a wedding picture (including more mutual friends).

All of these things screamed to me that he was still projecting an image of in-tact nuclear family that had been irretrievably broken for years. And I was still not allowed to share pictures of the two of us together, for fear that it would hurt someone unnecessarily or give someone the impression that there was something untoward about our relationship.

Except, there was nothing untoward about our relationship. His marriage had been over for years before we even began. They hadn’t shared more than co-parenting, as far as had been relayed to me. He was insistent that he loved me, that I understood and loved him more than anyone ever had, and that he was working for long-term future for us. For We. Oui.

“Keeping me in the shadows is hurting me,” I told him.

For the first time in almost two years with her, my own therapist expressed concern at his motivations for not moving forward at a more reasonable pace. Yes, so very much was happening at any given time, and his energy reserves cold be easily depleted. But, from my perspective, being faced with significant adversity tends to make people gravitate toward what they love the most.

I fully admit that I had moments of unparalleled utter fucking freak-out about the whole thing. I would be left waiting or rescheduled, because he couldn’t tell the kids or his brother that he already had plans with me. Illness could sideswipe a romantic rendezvous in a matter of moments. And when I asked when it would change, he would tell me he was thinking about how and when to do it.

“I’m looking for the right time.”

It played against all of my insecurities and my greatest fears: making me an object of shame, emotional abandonment, and dismissive ignorance of me. I had been fighting for years to deal with these issues. He knew about all of it—both from me and from my having openly written about the entire process—from the very beginning.

Through it all, I clearly defined my boundaries and defended them. I used my words and said when things were hurting me. I asked directly for change. I tried to avoid ultimatums. For more than a year.

But two months after introducing me to his parents, his children still had no idea that I even existed. He still wasn’t comfortable with telling my mom. I was still prohibited from posting a selfie of us together in case all the people who didn’t know realized we were a couple. I was given the responsibility of the emotional well-being of people I didn’t know and who didn’t even know I existed.

“I need a plan for how and when this changes, or I need the honesty that it isn’t changing,” I insisted. “To keep me living in this limbo is unkind and unloving, and it’s eating me alive.”

I did not demand to meet his kids immediately. I did not demand that he change his Facebook relationship status to include me. I asked that he offer us a path toward starting to blend our worlds—a necessary part of any future we would have together.

And so Bumblebee decided that losing me and losing We was less painful than acknowledging my existence. He chose to continue to hide and to refuse to do the hard work of change that would improve his own life. As I have seen partners do before, he threw up his hands and shrugged and said, “It’s too hard.”

“What the fuck?!?” my therapist said.

I’m not sure I have ever been so shell-shocked by a relationship in my life. It is all counter to everything I believed about him. The confusion from having been held and told days before that he wants every morning with me and then summarily dismissed and ignored is overwhelming. It feels distinctly as if I missed something somewhere. I have replayed every conversation and reread every message a dozen times or more, to the point of making myself sick from the dizzy.

I just don’t get it.

I can psychologize him—I have and likely will do so again. I understand what I believe to be his motivations. I understand his eccentricities and his weaknesses and clearly as I understand his strengths. I have loved him in spite of and because of them. But it is not the path I, or my girlfriends who came to know him quite well, believed he would choose. At all.

Knowing how previous relationships have played out, knowing my reticence and my fear and my strong desire to work through those issues, I was clear at every turn about what I needed and expected and why. He clearly responded that he understood and worked to meet those needs and expectations. Love and respect and care were mutual and reciprocal.

But now I find myself grieving. Breakup grief is different than the grief of death. You’re grieving the loss of the person, but you’re also grieving for yourself—as both the one who has lost and the one who is lost. Your identity with that person, the intertwined being the two of you created, is inextricably just gone.

And it undermines everything I came to trust and believe about myself. What did I miss? What did I do wrong? Was I really so arrogant to believe that I, myself, was making progress in dealing with my bullshit? Am I really just more broken that I realized? Is it impossible for me not to be better, if never fully repaired? Was I simply an object to him, a supplier of the comfort and affection he’d been missing for more than a decade? Was I just a great, gullible fuck? Was he really a coldhearted, calculating liar, capable of fooling me and all of my girlfriends?

Those are some of the questions I grapple with in the dark, in the middle of the night when I am awakened from some fitful dream. Those are the questions I churn throughout the day, as I’m driving or as I’m trying to work. Those are the questions I repeat in my head every time my heart feels like it’s clawing its way out of my chest.

Those are the questions I raged to Queen Frostine when, the day after he made this decision, the gift he’d sent for my birthday arrived in the mail. Because all of this happened two days before my birthday—just like it had two years before when Rango and I broke up.

(And let me tell you, there is no kick to the teeth quite like an unexpected birthday gift in the mail from your unexpectedly-recent ex.)

I don’t know how long this will go on. I can’t even begin to speculate about when I will start to feel human again. I’m currently waiting on a couple of my girls to get into town so that I can feel some love and support while I cry and wallow for a couple of days. I am plodding through work and home responsibilities and schoolwork, feeling like I’m watching everything happen slowly to me, as I move through some thick underwater. I feel dehumanized by his refusal to acknowledge my existence.

I am careful to comfort my internal parts. I am soothed the tiniest bit by knowing that I did everything I could to care for and defend myself. When I made mistakes and missteps, I apologized and did my very best to change. I was as patient with him and his situation as anyone could every be expected to be.

The fact is, I just have to get through it. Logically, the hurt will abate someday. For now, it’s the shadow I still can’t escape.

 

 

You can be the outcast, or you can be the backlash of somebody's lack of love... or you can start speaking up.

NOTE: This post includes discussion of some pretty difficult subject matter, presented in an emotionally honest way. It may not be appropriate for all reading audiences.

At the heart of my myriad insecurities is a deep-seated fear of emotional abandonment. I am afraid that the people who profess to love me will stop caring, will decide that I am not worth their love and affection, and will dismiss me and my own emotions outright.

Physical abandonment is daunting enough, but it always seems to be symptomatic of a deeper emotional distance. DH left after our 19-year marriage crumbled, but that came only after he’d emotionally checked out of our relationship for years. I’d struggled to get Rango to engage in any emotionally significant way for more than a year before he told me he just wasn’t showing up for Max’s football game or my birthday. And when Bounder was most overwhelmed by the intensity of our relationship, he stood me up and distanced himself—at least until he decided he missed me too much to stay away—only to do it again and again.  

But the fear comes, plainly, from my childhood and adolescence.

I’ve written extensively about the sexual abuse I suffered as a child. There are at least six years during which I can remember being told, “Don’t tell anyone. You’ll be the one to get in trouble.” Years later, when I did finally tell—in the aftermath of a date rape at 16—I was left to deal with the physical and emotional impact on my own. Both the molestation and the rape were acknowledged very calmly for a few days, but there was no significant follow-up. I wasn’t sent to a counselor or therapist. I was sent, by myself, for my first pelvic exam to make sure I didn’t contract an STD.

My fear and my shame were dismissed, were boxed away so that someone else could handle what happened to me. My emotions were treated as if they were secondary and unimportant—or at least it seemed that way to me. With the exception of one close friend who literally held my hand through the process of telling, I never once felt that I was supported or cared for in those days and weeks.

I was scared and sick and confused and alone. When I most needed to be loved, the person who should have loved me most left me alone in my horror, pretending then and for most of the years since that none of it happened.

So what I learned from an early age, and relearned over and over and over, was that when someone loves you, then they leave you when your emotions are too much for them.

They leave you when you are too much for them.

Because they can’t handle what they’re feeling in response to what you’re feeling, it’s easier to pretend the feelings don’t matter or that there are no feelings at all. So while love is supposed to be this caring, beautiful, wonderful thing, for me it’s also tainted by hurt, twisted up with rejection and carelessness and neglect.

None of this is new. None of this is revelation.

What is new for me is the realization that the subpersonalities are afraid that I will emotionally abandon them. They are terrified that I will decide that they aren’t worth the trouble, that the help they try to provide is too much of a hassle for me to bother to listen to them. They are afraid of being ignored and dismissed. They are afraid that I will shut them all down, in turn becoming exactly what I fear most.

And my choices, my culpability, in all of my relationship failures make my trustworthiness questionable. My complicity in DH’s ignorance of me, which I would go on to rebel against in the most damaging of ways possible. My constantly shifting boundaries, allowing Rango to pull further and further away while I accepted the blame for his distance. And my tortured love for Bounder, whose kiss could make time stand still and the seas turn to sand—who I will still seek out when I feel utterly lost and alone, even though I know he will almost certainly let me down. The multitude of others, who said I mattered but then walked away with barely a glance over their shoulders.

Besides, I was the one who was making out with that guy the night of the rape. I was the one whose tiny body reacted with sexual arousal when touched inappropriately. While that is a totally normal physiological response, the behavior that wasn’t normal became utterly normalized. I knew things at an age when I should’ve been happily playing with my baby dolls and getting hugs goodnight instead of confusion and lies to deflect someone else’s blame.

They won’t love me anymore if I don’t do this thing that feels weird and wrong, being done to me by someone who says they love me.

Hurt was normalized. Secrets and shame were normalized. Pretending like nothing happened, like it didn’t matter, was normalized.

So if I have culpability or complicity in those hurts, who the hell am I to be trusted? How can my internal family trust me to make healthy loving decisions for them when I can’t even seem to make them for myself? How can I be trusted to do the right thing for any of us?

The difference in me and those who’ve hurt me is that I don’t want to be distanced from my emotions or anyone else’s. I don’t want to be ignored or dismissed, and so I try like hell not to do the same to anyone else. To disregard those parts of myself, to act as if my own emotions just don’t exist or matter, inflicts unbearable hurt. Shutting down, being numb again, silencing those inner voices entirely is the last thing I ever want to do.

I have to show myself the love and care that I expect from anyone else.

Integration can only come about if I trust the parts not to hurt me and vice versa. I have to honor what each feels, acknowledge each emotion I am ultimately feeling, and accept that the emotion itself is not the trauma. The traumatic events are over and done; the feelings are ghosts whose chains rattle me in a million directions at once sometimes, making me shaky on my feet. Making me insecure.

I may be moving forward, but I’m not leaving them behind. These parts of me, trapped at different ages and stages of development—disintegrated—deserve the chance to mature. They deserve the opportunity to grown into the woman they would’ve become had shit not gone horribly wrong.

I deserve the same.

Part of that maturation is coming to terms with the fact that it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t allow those other people to hurt me. I didn’t encourage them to devalue me and to dehumanize me. I didn’t ask to be sexually assaulted. I didn’t ask for them not to love and care for me.

It wasn’t my fault.

IT WASN’T MY FAULT.

I am worth love, and I am worth care and concern. There is nothing about me that is so inherently ugly or unlovable to have warranted horrid, difficult abuse. I was a sweet, smart, precocious little girl with Moonpie eyes and one dimple. I should never have been a sexualized object. I didn’t deserve to be molested. I didn’t deserve to be raped. I didn’t deserve to be smacked around and degraded by an angry boyfriend. I didn't deserve to be used and abused and discarded.

I never deserved being the target of someone else’s self-loathing and guilt.

I was worth more than dismissal and ignorance because I didn’t meet someone else’s expectations or conform to their fucked-up, dysfunctional norms. I am worth more than an eyeroll-and-sigh in toleration.

All of those bits inside me have fought to protect me from hurt, from allowing anything in that might cause more damage, But the fracturing of my personality into smaller parts left vulnerable cracks. Rather than fill the spaces with gold, like Japanese kintsugi, I often used whatever I could find: leftover packing tape ripped from an old dusty box… someone else’s half-chewed gum… desperate hope coated in blood and sticky mess.

But I was never going to be able to close my own rifts with someone else’s effluvia.

It’s up to me to find the healing from deep inside me, to let those internal persona who so badly want and need to help do just that. If the end goal is a whole Stephanie, the parts that make her up have to have a role in filling those gaps.

So I’m letting them talk, and I’m listening. I’m hearing what each of them says they need, and I’m doing my best to honor those wishes. I’m giving each an opportunity to share their respective visions of wholeness and then choosing what works best for all of us. For me.

It is a process to pick up the broken pieces and put them back together. It took years for the breaks to happen, for the dust to settle enough for clean-up to begin. But it has.

And it’s up to me to do that work.

It’s up to me to show myself the love and care that I need, and that starts with sweeping away everyone else’s pain and destruction and refusing to force my bits to fit with theirs.

It’s up to me to trust that I can do this.  

 

 

And a place in your heart, dear, makes me feel more real.

Last week, I was walking and listening to music, as I’m prone to do. I’ve been walking again a lot lately, both to try to lose the weight I regained over the last couple of years and to clear my head a bit. The last few weeks have seen a lot of processing about everything going on in therapy. I admit to there being a lot of overthinking, as well.

I was listening to the new Mynabirds record, Be Here Now. Their first two records were especially poignant for me during and after my divorce. I hadn’t had a chance to hear this one, so it seemed a great choice for a three-mile walk on a lovely autumn evening. The record is quite good, and I added several tracks to various playlists, as I’m also prone to do. But something—and I can’t be sure what—in the song “Wild Hearts” set me off. It’s as lyrically fantastic as any other song Laura Burhenn has written, but something sent me spiraling toward epiphany.

As I’ve said before, the goal of the Internal Family Systems model of therapy is to reintegrate the subpersonalities that are formed as the result of traumatic events. No matter how dysfunctional their behavior may (or may not!) be, my subparts are trying their best to protect me from hurt and further damage. Some have very simple roles, while others are complex and nuanced in their approach to what they see as their role. They are such an integral part of me that I don’t always notice when one subpersonality is controlling in a situation. (Just think about any time you’ve ever gone off and yelled at someone, had a full-blown tantrum, maybe not even realizing how out of control you are until the moment passes and you’re able to reflect on it rationally. You were always you. You always knew you were you. You were just… not really yourself in that moment.) This part of my journey ends when each subpart is reconnected fully with my Self, which is able to make healthy choices without the need to call on the managers or the firefighters to protect the exiles, perpetually trapped by a moment of trauma.

As I was walking and listening, I had the realization that there is another subpersonality I hadn’t noticed before. In my mind, she looks like a child, though she isn’t. I tried to reach out to her and let her tell me about herself, having an internal dialogue with this deep part of myself. I realized the others had crafted her, had created her from their own bits and pieces. She knows everything each of the other subpersonalities knows, though they don’t each know everything she knows. She acts as sentry for Cissie, a strong last line of defense of the exile, able to protect her (and thus me) with the full knowledge of every other manager and firefighter subpart.

Every time a subpart experienced any kind of extreme emotion, it was transferred onto Pearl. Layer upon layer of hurt and damage, of ecstasy and deep love, grief and agony, irrepressible joy and unflagging hope—all built up slowly to create their own scapegoat, much in the way I created them.

And if I created them and they created her….

Yeah.

Pearl is, essentially, my muchness.

She is the figurative embodiment of everything I’ve lived for the last seven years. She is the angry rebellion against being shoved into a box and denied reciprocal affection. She is the wild abandon that led to not-always-healthy choices. She is the late-night drives with the windows down and the same song blaring for thirty miles. She is the trail of glitter left in my wake. She is the frustration at loving someone so much and not being able to be any more entwined with them.

She is the shame that comes from needing so badly to be loved. She is the uncontrollable, make-me-shake-with-the-sick-of-it-all fear of being emotionally abandoned. She is the overwhelming sorrow from not being able to think of one more thing, the just-the-right thing, to prove that I was worth their love.

Pearl takes those hits, because even the others aren’t always capable of doing it. So they—I—created her, coating both good and bad carefully on an amorphous form disguised as innocence. At the center of it all is the exact hurt and shame that they all fight like hell to protect Cissie from.

Even in the depths of my fucked-up psyche, I tried to make something beautiful from something ugly.

Queen Frostine and I talked at length about it all, as we are prone to do. She was surprised to realize how much of what I do is tied up with self-protection.

“All these things I think about when I think of you, I always just thought of them as personality traits. Now I’m seeing that they’re defense mechanisms, and that is so fucking weird to see.”

And it’s not just the unhealthier traits, like redrawing personal boundaries to accommodate men who refuse to do the same for me. It’s also the gregarious and seemingly-healthy ones, like my openness and willingness to put all of me out there no matter what others think.

Pearl came about as a last line of defense. She’s the general behind my own enemy lines, telling everyone else what to do. And she mimics my voice so well that I let her be in charge.

But she’s not the one who’s supposed to be in charge—I am. I’m the one who gets to make the decisions about what’s best for me, for us. I can have an internal dialogue with these persona, assigned by me as a way to catalog and contain my emotions, to make sense of it all.

The irony is that in dividing myself into these intricate parts, I have compartmentalized my own emotions, segmenting them and locking them away until I’m ready to deal with them—the very thing I hate most when others do it to me. To be ignored, to be dismissed, to be relegated to the dark and dusty recesses of someone’s heart until such time as I am convenient is enraging to me.

But I’m doing it to myself.

It’s time to let them out of their boxes, to remove the walls of compartment and allow them to wander free, talking to each other and to me. It’s time to let them out into the light and the fresh air, to experience my life fully and mindfully, able to see more than the limited view from the bottom of a box.

 

 

 

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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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. 

 

And I don't understand. You deserve so much more than this.

When I was a child and would misbehave, my mother would send me to my room, out of her line of sight, with the words, "I love you, but I don't like you very much right now."

I love you, but I don't like you.

I don't like you.

I love you, but....

I love you, because I have to.

I love you, because I am required to.

The more trouble I was in, the more of my name I would hear.  Just "Stephanie!" was a warning.  "Stephanie Karen!" meant I was treading on some pretty thin ice.  "Stephanie Karen Quinn!" meant there was likely a spanking in my immediate future. 

But when I was a good girl, when I was sweet and obedient and well-behaved, I was Cissie.

To this day, I'm not terribly clear on the origin of the nickname.  I know it was given to me by a close family friend.  It was not diminutive of my given name, nor was it reference to my being a sister; there was no sibling calling me Sissy, as is so common in the South.  (I was raised an only child, and my (step/instant/in-my-heart) brother came to live with my mom and stepdad when I was in college.)

I remember being called Cissie until junior high school, when I demanded that both family and classmates call me only Stephanie.  While it may have been sweet inside the family, it was hard to explain this other name that made no logical sense to anyone else.  Eventually I rebelled against this thing I didn't understand and established myself fully as Stephanie Quinn.  When I went to the alternative magnet high school, no one knew Cissie had ever existed. 

Cissie was blond and blue-eyed.  (Stephanie has green eyes.)  She was smart and shy, though she could flourish as a chatterbox when she was comfortable.  For Cissie, it was important to be what Mama and Daddy and everyone else expected her to be.  If she wasn't, she was punished. 

Cissie - Age 3 or 4

But sometimes, no matter what Cissie did, she was just not enough.  She was tall but uninterested in basketball or sports of any kind.  She was smart but sometimes didn't want to do the tedious, necessary classwork.  Sometimes she tried to do it her own way, to challenge and entertain herself, but she would be chastised for doing it wrong, for not doing it how others wanted or expected it to be done. 

Cissie was also scared a lot.  Daddy had a sharp temper and would yell loudly at the least provocation.  Sometimes he would rear his hand back in anger, and sometimes it made contact.  Mama would nod and "Uh-huh" while Cissie talked, but she didn't always seem to hear those little girl words, especially if they weren't the words Mama wanted to hear.  And sometimes Mama would lash out in momentary anger and pop her little arm with the hard plastic hairbrush.  The oval red spot on the back of her arm might sting for hours, but it never felt as harsh as the pressing lump in her throat, the one she refused to talk or cry over. 

Cissie learned to spend time on her own, to entertain herself with imaginary friends and wishes for things that just never seemed to come true.  Cissie learned to bite the inside of her cheeks in just the right way that both kept her quiet and betrayed none of the anger she was harboring inside her little sweetheart mouth.  She had repetitious nightmares of witches and of vampires who lived in the back of her closet.

Cissie was also the little girl who was molested by a man who said he loved her, by a man who told her that if she didn't go along with it or if she spoke about it that she would be in trouble. 

It's no wonder that I didn't want to be Cissie. 

Stephanie - Age 14

 

But lately that little girl has been trying to tell me something. 

After another Fragile Cat skittered away, I was in a text conversation with Bounder (which is a whole different blog post's worth of fuckedupedness):

I'm tired of the hurt, you know? I'm tired of hiding in plain sight.  I don't want to be afraid of the shadows, scared of what seems to be there but isn't.  I feel again like my heart if wasting away.  I can't take another one who stays for days or weeks, with all of his fine words and implications.  I'm better with the balance, and I can't put these lessons into play without another person on the other side of that equation.  I want that safe place.  It's what I miss most, and I'm afraid.

And for all of my crazy, for all of my batshit and intensity, I'm a really good girl.  A guy could do a hell of a lot worse than me.

Very true statement dear...

I feel like being me will never be good enough.  I can either be myself or be what someone else expects.

And that little girl in me started to cry. 

It didn't matter what I did sometimes.  It didn't seem to matter that I was smart or clever or funny, loving or imaginative or curious, as long as I was doing what was expected of me.  As soon as I defied expectations, "I love you, but...."

There is no caveat for love.

There should be no conditions on love.  No one should ever have to negotiate the basics of their personality or their soul to feel that they are loved.  If a man tells me now that he loves me but he wishes I were quieter, less impulsive, less brash, more submissive, daintier, more deferential, I shouldn't accept those things.  I wouldn't accept those things, except I have accepted those things because it is what I learned as a child. 

Be different for me to love you, because what you are now is too much, is not enough, is wrong, and I cannot care for this defiant creature that you are.

All Cissie wanted was to be told that she was good enough, that it didn't matter that she wasn't perfect, that she defied Mama and Daddy's ideals in ways that still made her special and beautiful and acceptable and likable and lovable.  She wanted to know that she was good enough, that she didn't have to keep fighting and trying, that it was okay to be less than perfect.  And she wanted to know that she was good enough, that they would be proud of her for who she was, not for the accomplishments and the grades and the good choices she made that were really never choices at all. 

So for that little girl, to that little girl, I say, "Cissie, it's okay.  You are a good girl.  You were always a good girl.  It's wonderful that you weren't perfect, and it's good that you made mistakes.  You watched and learned, and you helped get me to here and now.  I'm sorry you didn't feel safe and protected and loved like you should've.  You deserved that, not just because you were a little girl but because you brilliantly, spectacularly special, and you were you."

Tonight, I will let her cry all she wants, to let out what is hurting her heart still, and I will tell her as often as she needs to hear it that she was worthy of all of that love, even when she wasn't always shown that. 

Going forward, I will do my best to honor that, to remind her and remind myself that Stephanie is resilient and sensitive because of the bullets Cissie took, that I learned to rebel because of the deference she endured and the secrets she kept, that I deserve healthy love now just as much as she did then. 

We are both worth it. 

 

Show me your secret, and tell me your name. Catch me with your fizzy smile.

Men love to tell me their shit.  People, in general, will reveal private information to me pretty readily, but especially men.

I can fall quickly into easy conversation with almost anyone.  For all of my talk of being ignored when I go out by myself, it's not entirely true.  In the grocery store or out running errands, I talk with strangers all day long.  While I can be a little shy in the beginning, I'm pretty loquacious once I'm comfortable. 

But there seems to be something about me that just puts men at ease, to the point that they will share their deepest and darkest pretty quickly.  I have more unexpected details of random men's deviant pasts and sexual proclivities than I could write about in a lifetime.  (That doesn't mean it won't stop me from trying.) 

It has kind of become a joke within the Castration Committee, that I can walk into a room of a hundred men and point them out, the fragile cats, and pinpoint their damage on sight.  There's something about the way they carry themselves or a look in their eye; I just know who they are. 

Something about me seems to strike a chord, like they're seeing a kindred spirit for the first time.  I certainly have my own dramatic past, and I am more than willing to talk openly about it.  Even without revealing my own intimacies, they pick up on some aspect of my personality that makes them feel comfortable enough to tell me all the ways in which their parents and exes failed them, to describe how they clawed their way to and from their own rock bottoms, or to whisper their most lurid desires into my newly-acquainted ear. 

Maybe there's some pheromone that I'm releasing constantly.   Maybe they really can smell me in the air.  Maybe it's just that I am so damn attracted to the fragile, skittish cat and that I'm seeking them out without realizing it. 

Because I am a non-traditionalist in so many ways, I tend to gravitate toward the fringes.  I like strong personalities that lean toward the left.  I may be on the hunt for a great alpha male, but he would never be a hardcore Republican corporate attorney.  That may be perfectly fine for some people but not for me.  I like intense and creative and non-conformist, because that's where I find the intellectual stimulation I need coupled with the passion I crave.  Men like that, people like that, often come from dramatic and traumatic backgrounds, especially now that we're halfway through our lives. 

Part of me loves being in that position, of being a safe place of comfort for someone to off-load some of their strife for a while.  I am especially adept at filtering other people's energy and helping them carry what has become too much for them.  In the end, it's their job and not mine to deal with that baggage in the long term; I can't keep it for them forever.

 When it comes to men, though, I often find myself on the receiving end of sincere thanks, of hearing how I've changed and altered them and their perceptions of their worlds, how I've helped them deal with some shit so they could move on in a healthier way. 

Seriously?

How the hell did I become someone else's catalyst?  What is it about me that make me worth some time and a little effort, plus a hell of a lot of intensity, but not worth a longer-term relationship? 

I want to be that safe haven for someone for more than a day or a week or a few months.  I want to find that man who can share his heart and his life as easily as he shares his bed and his secrets.  I want someone who is willing to stick it out, who doesn't say, "Thanks for helping me deal with my fucked up head.  Have a nice life!"

There will always be issues with men like this.  Even the most reformed of the fragile cats remain skittish to a degree.  I'm the same way.  Every so often, I'm still surprised by a memory or recognition of something from my past that collides brilliantly with my present.  It scares the hell out of me when it happens.

What I need is someone who can be patient with me through that process, to continue to love me when I'm scared or angry or hurt, and not just because it's what feels right that day.  I want someone who can face the worst of me and still love me the next morning.  I expect myself to be able to love others with full openness and reciprocity; it is really too much to ask for the same?

Come a little bit closer before we begin.

 

Growler and I went to a show this week at the Masquerade in Atlanta.  We were supposed to be there to see In This Moment, but there was a 6:00 door, which we didn't realize until 7:15.  We got there just in time to see the stage being broken down and set up for the main act, Stone Sour.  (They were okay.  I'm not a huge fan, but it was a good show.)

I was surprised, though, that even in this environment—music show, my ideal demographic—the only guy who talked to me was in his early 20s and gay.  I got stared at a lot, but not one other guy really spoke to me.  I still had a great time with Growler, as always, but I was a bit flabbergasted, if totally used to it.  I was dressed down—black sundress, Chuck Taylors, and pigtails—so I wasn't even really trying to attract anyone.  Even when I do get really dressed up, though, it's rare that men actually approach and talk to me.

It's starting to make me feel like a freak.

It's not that I'm so enamored of myself that I'm appalled that men could turn down this hot chick.  (Really, I don't think that at all, at least not of strangers.)  But several men as of late, when I've mentioned this, have said that I'm a bit intimidating.

Me?  Seriously?

I can understand it if you've actually talked to me.  I'm bawdy and loud and smart and sarcastic—generally a big ball of glittery batshit.  But until you get to know me, I'm often just that quiet blonde over there. 

According to this informal survey, the fact that I am tall and blonde and busty in my general Amazonianness leads men to think they'll get shot down.  One woman told me that a guy once told her that men are actually more afraid of rejection than women are, if only because they've been more likely to be rejected than a woman. 

So I started thinking about this idea of women having to attract men.  In social situations, there's a definite expectation that women act a certain way.  There are all kinds of blogs and articles advising us to tone it down when we are meeting men, to be a little coy and pliant and make them feel special.  I see women, especially younger women, playing this flirty game of dumb blonde that drives me insane.  I know damn well that girl won't be anything like that once you get into her head, unless she really is that stupid.

Fuck that.

I can be quiet and coy and even pliant, but that's almost always reserved for the guy I'm actually with.  I am who I am (see above), and I've been adamant that I refuse to hide that from anyone, especially from myself and from potential romantic interests.  It feels dishonest for so many reasons. 

But are men actually afraid to talk to me?  Why?

I'm a nice girl.  Really.  I can carry on a conversation about almost anything.  I'm pleasant and funny and do know how to be socially appropriate most of the time.  (I know the inner circle will laugh at that, but they also know they're most often the direct target of my inappropriateness.)  I have a nice smile, and you might even get to see my dimple if you make me laugh. 

I'm also very sociable and will at least try to chat with almost anyone.  The worst thing that happens is that I don't hit it off with you and we say goodnight and move on.  Big deal.  But if you want my attention, you'd better be willing to at least meet me halfway.  Be nice.  Be funny.  Be pleasant.  Show me your smile.  Don't expect me to do all the work to put you at ease.  I'm just as nervous at the thought of being rejected—and maybe moreso given my personal history. 

And the truth is, I expect to be too much for most men to handle, so I do tend to kind of stay back and revert to my natural introversion until I feel like there's something worth exploring.  Maybe it's standoffish on my part.  I'm really no damn good and just walking up to a guy and introducing myself, especially when I'm surrounded by non-Amazon girls.  I'm not that tiny, cute thing and never will be.  I still constantly compare myself to those women, even though I know I am and have so much to offer. 

Dating is weird.  Men are weird.  Women are crazy.  How the hell this thing ever works and relationships can move forward into something longer-lasting is just baffling to me.  If you don't actually talk to me, you'll never know if I'm worth your time.  And vice versa. 

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.