I hate drunk people so much. It took me forever to find the "post new blog" link. it's not in the right hand corner like the journal pages said it would be. the drunks in this living room are driving me fucking crazy. I want to punch them forever.

 

It's Halloween. That used to be my all time favorite holiday.

 

The time changed today, for daylight savings. That always really tripped me out, time changing. Everything is so mediated by clocks. They're so static and infallible but every now and then everyone just decides the time is different and then, it is. I used to wonder what else could be different if everyone just decided at once.

 

So this is my first Icarus blog entry and I might as well just cut to the chase. Here it is. I was molested by my babysitter when I was maybe 8 years old, maybe a little younger. Her name was Natalie. It was pretty bad. I used to think it wasn’t that big a deal, if I thought about it at all. As a little kid I had neither the language nor the awareness to understand that I had been assaulted, that I had been raped. I experienced the whole thing as if I had broken my arm. Brief, painful but forgotten shortly afterward. I didn’t tell anyone until I was 21 or 22 and then only to one person with whom I am in love.

 

I remembered it in stages. First, like I said, as an injury. A thing that happens, hurts, but as soon as it’s over fades just into an event absent the pain itself. Later when I first became dimly aware that maybe something fucked up had gone on I remembered the feelings. The sharp pains in the stomach, the hunched shoulders and the fetal position and the nausea and the fear. Most recently I’ve been remembering the sequence of events. The details and the nuances. The locations, the lighting. The expressions and the gestures.

 

It came up kind of suddenly. I was having a conversation with my mother about my younger brother. He’s handsome. Taller than me, more popular. Muscular. Masculine. He’s also a sexist ass hole. I was telling my mom about some unsavory observations I had made about my brothers detached nihilism. He has a tendency to be self involved, judgmental and cruel. Off handedly, my mother mentioned that “Yeah, well, so things happened to your brother when he was little that go a long way to explain some of his less than perfect qualities. There’s a good reason he’s angry.”

 

I knew immediately and immediately I felt like a fucking idiot. It happened to him too. Why had it never occurred to me that it could have happened to him too? I asked my mom if this was about the babysitter and she asked if he had talked about it with me and I said no. I told her it happened to me too. That’s as far as the conversation went then. This whole revelation happened a few months ago.

 

Last week I went down to visit and my mother and I had a longer conversation about it. I had to stop while talking. I was surprised to find myself getting so upset, I mean, it did happen a long time ago and I had been aware of it for a few years. I guess I just never really got around to hashing out the events themselves. Since then I’ve been having regular nightmares. Sometimes during the day just flash back into being locked in the bathroom with her. Other parts too. It happens out of order but I’ve been reexperiencing it over and over.

 

That was my introduction to my own sexuality. I say it that way, consider that act of violence as part of my sexuality because when I started having sex, before that even, when I began masturbating and lusting after other kids I remembered the stirring in the pit of my stomach, the itching in my crotch, I remembered it from before. Since I was unaware that what was happening to me as a child was violent, it was easy to misunderstand the complicated feelings I had in my adolescence as part and parcel with normal sexual development. I just didn’t know any better.

 

Since I was a little kid, not that much older than I was that night in the bathroom, I’ve been attracted to men. My first consensual sexual experiences were with other boys and subsequently shrouded in different layers of secrecy and shame. I was so detached from  that early formative sex and so saturated with heteronormative poison that up until more recently than I’d care to admit, I considered 15 the age that I lost my “virginity”, when I had consensual intercourse with a woman for the first time. In fact I was closer to 12.

 

Every sexual experience I’ve had in my entire life has been built on a foundation of violence. My girlfriends in high school would use sex to hurt themselves. They would make me an unwitting weapon. I had only two serious sexual relationships in my teens, both of which were deeply marked by shame and sex as a vehicle for emotional punishment. It was a power struggle between us and without realizing it I delegated myself a position that directly mirrored my role in my abuse as a child. As a child I went with my abuse willingly, ignorant of the power I didn’t even know I had was being taken away. In my older years I gave up my power, and thusly my emotional self seeing it as unimportant. I had no place in my own experiences. I didn’t know how.

 

I am a human being and like most human beings I have sexual desires. Up until recently I was only vaguely aware of my own wants and proclivities. This isn’t to say I didn’t desire the partners I’ve had, but I did deny my personal sexual composure.  I never allowed myself, or even knew how, to become vulnerable and emotionally open through sex. It was mostly a closed off activity, physically pleasurable but colored by lingering shame.

 

That is to say up until several years into my only enduring adult sexual relationship. She and I have run into problems the last year and a half. At this point we’re over five years deep and for the last little while have been dramatically on again/off again. After a few rocky starts, we finally hit upon an arraignment for an open relationship that was appearing to work out. We both got the space and independence we needed to shake off a lot of destructive codendancy. Unfortunately, we still manage to find ways to undermine and hurt eachother.

 

Most recently she made a decision to bring her other partner, a man she has, it seems, deep and serious feelings for into town to stay at her house. Up until this point she would travel down to the bay area to see him and I was comforted by the amount of space between her relationship with this other guy and our relationship. The lines between the two were stark and clear and I liked it that way.

 

With just the worst possible timing ever, his stay in town overlapped extensively with my return. I had been out of town having the visit with my parents where all these revelations about my rape were occurring. At the same time, a massive cluster fuck I had nothing to do with broke my house apart as well as my band. Now I’m crazy (why else would I be posting here?) and stability and support from my friends and my relationship are absolute pillars of my self-care strategy. I must have them so as to not spiral totally out of control of myself. I had made plans to stay with my partner when I got back to town, but having this guy there was fucking everything up. I then had to deal with balancing a tricky polyamorous tight rope at a time when I could barely convince myself that I was holding onto reality.

 

I told my partner that I really really needed her support right then. I don’t often ask for things in our relationship. She told me that she just needed to be selfish, even if it meant treating me poorly. She wouldn’t reschedule her visit, wouldn’t work on a compromise and generally didn’t care that I was in the middle of a total collapse. I was hearing voices again, deeply troubling. Seeing things. Losing it, basically.

Our relationship is generally good and strong. We’ve often made promises to be there for each other when we really needed it. It was hard to learn that I was so easy to dismiss because it was inconvenient.

 

I don’t mean to paint too harsh a picture. She has done a lot really amazing work overcoming her own demons and legitimizing her own desires. At any other time, when I had the stability of a home and a solid support structure to count on, I would have welcomed this new, if uncomfortable, development. She certainly deserves to have the life she wants and has every right to protect the gains she’s made in her life. At the same time, we made promises to each other. I never would have turned her down if she told me she needed me, especially if I knew how important the closeness of our relationship was for her, as it was for me. It really poured a lot of salt into some recently reopened wounds.

 

So I was left with a choice. Suck it up and accept that I’m not good enough to have my needs and my emotional safety respected or lose the relationship. As bad as this may sound, I am completely unwilling to lose the relationship. I know with work, we can move through this, as we’ve moved through difficult challenges in the past.

 

So this brings me full circle to the thing I really wanted to talk about. I am threatened by my partner’s healthy sexuality. My sexual relationship with her has been the first and only forum to even speak about my own sexual desires, the only occasion I’ve been that vulnerable and felt safe. So much about accepting love is about a capacity to be vulnerable and with her I felt love and desire without shame and self hatred. Her involvement in an intimate sexual relationship with another guy, in the bed we used to share at the zenith of my own need for the very safety she seemed was enjoying with someone else was overwhelming and threatening and terrifying.

 

The hardest part for me was the knowing, not just knowing but really feeling that she wasn’t doing anything wrong or bad by wanting or having a relationship with this guy. It sucked she ignored me when I needed her, but her relationship wasn’t the problem. It hadn’t been a problem in the past after all. I was deeply troubled by the powerful feelings of helplessness (and shame and weakness and powerlessness and voicelessness) that I was experiencing. Where the fuck was it coming from?

 

It was a lonely process figuring it out, but I finally think I’m starting to get a handle on it. The answer lies across multiple dimensions, and to be seen must be looked at from the right perspective. I was raped as a child by a woman and it informed, shaped really, my sexual development as a man. I was instilled with an attached feeling of shame and denial to my sexual self. My partner was not the one who raped me, but when she puts me in situations where she shakes my faith in her ability to respect the value of my emotional self and violates my trust in her as a person who cares about me enough to take my vulnerabilities seriously by acting as if they were important, than I reexperiance the trauma of my rape as a form emotional insecurity. I lose my grip on what’s real and I’m unable to tell if I’m feeling something or if I’m remembering what something felt like.

 

Furthermore I must question how shaken up I get. By her own admission she could have been WAY more understanding of my needs, but her actions weren’t as severe as my response to them. Thankfully I’ve grown enough through this relationship to respond to these situations with introspection instead of anger or punishment. That’s what a regrettable younger me would have done. I’m glad I’m past that for the most part.

 

It’s hard to see what’s right in front of me some of the time. Thinking about it now it’s clear that my entire emotional and sexual life has developed in a battle field of trauma and of course I’m going to resort to the lowest common denominator of insecurity if the part of my brain which doesn’t think “rationally” but instead just responds emotionally without thinking at all is left to wander unchecked. It is MY responsibility to deal with my own wounds, especially to not take those wounds out on my partner in the form for anger. It’s okay to be a little angry when you trust someone to be there for you when they say they’re going to be and they let you down. It’s not okay to be mean and I feel good about most of the way I’ve responded to this fucked smorgasbord.

 

Now I find myself in a place I’ve been before, and as with before I’ve had trouble getting out of it. Having worked on my shit, come to better understanding of myself as well as a tough situation I’m left to wonder, what do I do now? While I may know more about the roots of my emotional reactions, it doesn’t make them go away. That guy is still here, in my partners bed while I huddle alone on a cold couch at a friend’s, still with no stable home. I ache to be with her and enjoy the safety we’ve worked so hard to build, but I question whether that’s even possible now given the damage that’s been done to my trust. It’s humiliating to truly call on your best friend and lover in a time of sincere, dire need and be told no because another boy is just more fun. Maybe that’s a misguided projection, but it’s certainly how it feels.

 

I have no idea what I’m going to do. The only thing that seems clear is that the work I have to do is hardly over, that things won’t get easier quickly and the future of my relationship is far from assured. Despite this, it feels good to get more in touch with myself. The more I understand the causes of my reactions, the more confidence I have in one day living a life that’s not so governed by them, where the trauma I’ve been given is a thing I fully own and the complications that come from living an involved life are welcome moments of growth. I guess that’s about where I am right now.