Kim and I went to dinner on Leap Day with our mutual friend, Justine. Justine had an old iPhone 5 that she wasn't using, so she was going to basically give it to me, because my phone was barely working anymore. She asked for $20, which Kim volunteered to pay, and now I have a phone that is very nice. We set up the date, and all met at Café Flora, in Madison Park.
Kim sat next to me at dinner, and I felt the same sort of distance from her then as I'd been feeling for the previous several days. Not enough to have me melting down about it, but enough to make me worry. We all chattered away amiably and normally, and then Kim and I went back to her place while Justine headed off alone. On the drive back, I resolved to ask Kim for some reassurance once we got to her place. Things felt distant and tired and crumbly, the way they had in past relationships that were past their expiration dates.
But I had just walked out on her about a month earlier, thinking that I was making the best and kindest decision for both of us. I regretted that mistake terribly, but I did it, and it drastically changed the timbre of our relationship. She had said it would take her awhile to fully relax around me again, and that it would probably be a very long time before she felt emotionally safe giving me back the keys to her place. (I'd left them there when I walked out.)
Since I had left in such a manner, with this unilateral decision that I did not consult her about, one of the things she wanted from me was reassurance that I'd never do something like that again. That if things were bad, and I felt like we should end them, that I'd come and talk to her, and not just decide. So I promised her that. It was an easy promise to make, since I viewed just deciding and leaving as a mistake in the first place. Over the next few weeks, I'd promise again, with a pinky-swear, and a third time, with a double-pinky-swear.
But I never asked her to give me the same courtesy.
So we got into her place, and I was as open and vulnerable as I could make myself. All ports available, ready to communicate in whatever ways we could, no matter how challenging for me. I didn't just have my guard down. I had everything as exposed as it possibly could be. I was ready for any kind of dialogue, and I was trying to think of the right way and moment to bring up my need for reassurance.
She asked me to come sit by her on the bed, after I'd changed into pajamas for the night. I stopped whatever I was doing, and clambered past her to my spot.
"What's up?" I asked.
"I don't want to be in a romantic relationship with you anymore."
Everything fell out from under me. I couldn't breathe, I felt like I'd had the wind knocked out of me. As if I'd been shot in the chest, but with the impact spread through a SAPI plate. And then directly into my heart, over and over and over.
I started sobbing, gasping for breath, rolling over to one side. She said more, but I couldn't understand a word. I got up and started wandering aimlessly, looking for anything to steady myself, emotionally. Any kind of anchor. And then I made out a little of what she was saying, again:
"You can take the futon for the night," she said, right as I happened to look at it. That was where I would sleep. Not with her. Not next to her. Not by her side, warm and safe, drifting off while she read. Not hearing her talk in her sleep. Not ever again. More rounds into my chest.
"I have to leave," I said, shakily. She tried to talk me out of it, saying I was not in any shape to drive. I frantically packed my things as she followed me around trying to convince me to at least stay until I was calmer. I couldn't take her telling me that. Every time she suggested I stay, I thought about it. And I thought about how utterly rejected I felt, not just by her, but by the space itself. "I have to go, I have to go, I have to go," I said over and over, until finally she stopped talking.
She stood between me and the door, pleading with me to not just leave. "What about your other things? The vase and the flower from your friends?" she asked.
"I have to leave, I can't be here," I said, and I meant it in every sense of the word. I could not exist in that space while I felt as though she and it were both casting me out. Forever.
She sighed and stepped aside, and I stumbled out to my car, still in my pajamas.
The drive home was thankfully uneventful. I don't even think I considered my old favorite go-to suicide fantasy of pulling the wheel hard when I was on the freeway, and going off a bridge. Those kinds of thoughts came later.
Kim had posted something on her Facebook about us breaking up, apparently. I didn't look, and I've still never seen it. I don't know that I ever will. Our roles had reversed. For once, I wanted to be invisible, hidden to the world, while at the same time, she was posting about what had happened between us on her social media. But by the time I got home, I had friends rallying to me, sending me messages of support and love. Thankfully, none of them asked me to tell them what had happened.
The next morning, I posted on my personal Facebook about it, saying that I didn't really want to talk about it, but since people were messaging me, I felt like I had to. And then I went to the first day of the interpersonal communication skills class I'd signed up for at the VA. They were supposed to help Kim and me stay together. But I'd started too late.
All throughout the class, I kept stifling hysterical laughter. I knew it would be awful for everyone if I just started sobbing, so I held it down as much as I could, and that was what happened instead. I kept losing it, because everything seemed so clear and simple and sensible, and I'd come to that too late for it to matter for Kim and me. It was the emotionally devastating equivalent of walking around your house for an hour, looking for your sunglasses, only to realize that they'd been propped up on top of your head the whole time.
The first packet asked plain and straightforward questions. "When is it difficult to express yourself appropriately? When do you become angry or hostile? Blame yourself or others? Deny your feelings or theirs? Be specific."
In answering those kinds of questions, I realized something that was probably obvious already to any outside observer. I struggle to express myself in very close relationships with anyone with whom I believe I have a power imbalance that places me in the submissive role. When I was a little girl, I learned very quickly that the best way to keep the peace was to never say anything. To never offer an opinion on anything, to never share what scared me or made me feel happy. I did that because I perceived my parents as having power over me, and the fact is that they did.
In my intimate romantic relationships, I have always historically disappeared more and more, and I can see that now as a continuation of that same maladaptive survival mechanism. As my romantic partners got closer to me, I was subsumed more and more, until the person they fell in love with was all but invisible. It helped me survive my parents, but it has gone on to wreak havoc in my partner relationships. It was like taking a tank to war, but then, when the war was over, continuing to use it as my main mode of transportation, oblivious to the roads I was destroying just by driving on them.
With Kim, the power imbalance was large and obvious. She has means, and I do not. When she said "get whatever you like," at restaurants or stores, I would, with the exuberant gluttony of the long-starved. And I appreciated her for it. Not so much for what she provided, but for the fact that she found me worth providing it to. No matter how many people love me in how many ways, I still fundamentally automatically believe I am not worth loving, because that was what I grew up with. That was my earliest estimation of myself, and I have never really challenged it.
Resentment piled up as she felt more and more taken advantage of, and worried I was with her mostly, or only, because she lavished me with gifts. I worked diligently to keep myself from being so carelessly greedy on her dime, and to reinforce my truth to her: that all I wanted from her was her. Her time, her presence. Just her.
Once, we went to get snacks at Trader Joe's. After grabbing maybe $20 or $30 worth of dried fruit and such, I saw some green tea mints at the point of sale. Green tea? And mint? Together? I lit up, and grabbed a tin to put onto the pile with the rest of our things. She paid, and I put the tin directly into my purse. But once we got outside, she told me how upset she was that I'd grabbed that one extra thing. That I'd already taken so much, and then had the audacity to take more, without even asking.
The tin is still in my purse. I never opened it, and I don't think I ever will. It lives next to my wallet, and every time I reach in there for my own money, my hand brushes against it, and I pause. I remember that everyone else has limited resources, too. That Kim's wealth only seemed so fabulous to me because I have so little. That if she shared it with me, it was a gift of limited resources, not the keys to the kingdom. I needed to be more mindful of her limits, even if I didn't know exactly what they were. I needed to think about how much things cost, which was a struggle for me even when I was making very good money during the boom times of the dot-com era.
It was a good lesson to learn.
I looked down at the worksheets in my class, and paid attention as we were given our first tool. "Assertive Communication: 'I' Statements," it read. A simple formula for devising a three-part statement centered only on myself and observable fact, two of my favorite things, was laid out. Label the situation, state how it affects me, and make a specific request of what I would like to see happen to improve things.
"This would have been everything we needed, two months ago," I said, when the class was asked to offer thoughts on the course materials. I shook my head sadly, kept doing my best to not cry, and finished the session. Our homework included trying to practice using those "I" statements over the coming week, and I resolved to try with an email to Kim. I quickly discovered that there was a reason this class is in eight parts.
Trying to express all of the complex emotions I was struggling with in the aftermath of a break-up with only "I" statements for tools was like trying to build a house with only a hammer and a few nails for tools.
One of the automatic thoughts assailing me repeatedly after Kim dumped me was that I was not sexually desirable, and never would be to anyone. I probably fixated on this because Before, I never thought of myself as sexually desirable in the first place, and also because Kim was clear that she didn't want a romantic relationship with me. My translation of that was that she wanted a non-sexual relationship, which of course could only mean that now that we'd had enough sex for her to be able to judge, she decided I was not worth the effort.
Obviously, this is absurd, and I can see that, now. Kim had pointed out, several times during our relationship, how many more pictures of me she had than anyone else she'd ever been with. At first it was just "more." Then it was "more than twice as many as the previous top spot holder." Then it was "more than everyone else combined." When we had sex, it was incredible. She was the only partner I'd ever really felt connected to and seen by. Which makes sense, since she's the only partner I've had since realizing who I even was in the first place.But in the moment, with the automatic thought of the plummeting value of my sexual worth amplified by the black hole in my chest, it seemed more than just plausible. It seemed absolutely true. (As an aside, these kinds of experiences are why I have empathy for transphobic people, for bigots in general. Fear + Mythology > Observable Fact, if we don't actively work to dismantle our fears and our mythologies.)
I set up my Tinder profile again, and spent my nights sobbing and frantically pawing through piles of people, desperately wanting to connect. Not to any of them, but to Kim. There was a Kim-shaped hole in my heart, and I knew I couldn't fill it with her. I knew that the best thing I could do was hold on through the pain, until it closed up and healed. But I initially failed to keep a grip on that idea.
I started to think, "maybe if I find some guy and let him fuck me, I'll feel like I'm desirable again. Maybe I'll believe that I can be."
Then I thought, "but maybe he will kill me." This is a relatively common end, sadly. A cis guy has sex with a trans woman, and then flips out about it, and becomes terrified that maybe that made him gay. So he kills her. And yeah, okay, we can all understand that if you're a man who has sex with a woman, that's not really gay, is it. And yeah, okay, we can all understand that if you're having sex that you perceive as gay, you were already pretty gay to begin with, because otherwise you wouldn't have sought out something you think of as gay. And yeah, okay, we can all understand that if you murder someone, you're objectively awful in a way that simply being gay could never make you, or anyone. But it happens.
And here's the thing: I didn't care. I was in so much pain that I honestly was briefly okay with the idea of some random dude fucking my brains out, and then blowing my brains out. I would feel desired for a moment, and then I would feel nothing. The pain would stop.
Hanging onto myself through all of that was hard. Like Before, when I constantly wished I was dead, because the pain of living was unbearable, I was too overwhelmed by that same pain to actually get up and do anything about it. I never even left my bed. I cried until I couldn't breathe, and then I cried some more. It felt endless, like I was in a fog. I could barely see reality, so I was left alone with my worst thoughts about myself.
At some point, I did start interacting a little bit on Tinder. One woman suggested I check out some Tara Brach podcasts, saying that they always helped her when she was struggling with her self-concept and loving herself. I thanked her, and ultimately did check one out. It was called The RAIN of Self-Compassion, which I picked after scrolling down a list of all her talks, and feeling like it was probably the most immediately relevant one. It helped tremendously, and I can't overstate that, but the more interesting direct interaction was with a man.
Christopher started messaging me very much like most men seem to, with some variation of "hey, sweetie" or whatever. And ordinarily, I would've ignored him. I would have bristled at being called anything other than my name, by a stranger, especially a man, but in the state I was in, I didn't care. I was just happy to be courted. I rolled my eyes, and we started chatting. His sexual interest in me was only very thinly veiled, and that was the amount of veiling I wanted right then.
I switched gears often, allowing him to be sexually expressive for awhile before demanding that he keep up with me on a change in topic. That's a reflection of my stubborn demisexuality, demanding that I have a more complete connection with someone before thinking very seriously about sex. Or at least demanding that I feel like I have that kind of connection. I want to feel desired, but in a complete way, not like a hole in the wall.
As I started to feel more and more comfortable with the idea of meeting Christopher in person, I had to address one last worry. I still believed that I was fundamentally unattractive. So, after yet another round of him proclaiming how hot he thought I was, I pointed out that if we went to bed together, he wasn't going to wake up to me in that blue Boho Republic dress, with professional makeup and hair. I pointed him to an Instagram picture I'd put up, right after waking up the other day, with a little bit of visible stubble, bedhead, a comfy tank top, and a smile.
"This is what I look like when I wake up," I said.
"Gotcha."
That was all he said. I burst into tears, told him I was tired and going to go to sleep, and rolled over to try to do just that. Everything I was afraid of was proven true in that one word. Once he really looked closely at me, even as my photograph smiled back at him, he didn't want to look anymore. I read this shift in language as being basically "YOU'RE SO HOT YOU'RE SO HOT YOU'RE SO HOT... oh."
When I woke up the next morning, I thought, "I should try this 'I' statement stuff." I assumed he didn't think I was attractive anymore, so I should get back to the facts of the interaction, and then talk to him about it, right? Simple. I showed him a picture I was worried he might not react to favorably, and he said one word, and I made up an interpretation and ran with it, right off a cliff. I sat with my worksheet and started to write him, and it was plain right away that my interpretation of his one word was way off.
What I thought he was thinking was actually almost the exact opposite of what he was thinking. I related this anecdote to Jenn, my best friend, #myfavoritemistake, a little later. She pointed something out that should be obvious, but wasn't, to me, at the time.
I'd been so invested in these classes as a means of helping Kim and I reconnect and stay together. But the fact is, it was a lot easier to use this simple tool in a simple conversation with someone I really don't know at all than it was to write that email to Kim. Instead of trying to frame and build a whole house with a hammer and some nails, I was just trying to board up a busted window. Seeing how easily I could navigate these situations if I had the right tools for them made it dawn on me — that even if I could never really read non-verbal cues, it wouldn't matter in my interpersonal relationships if I learned these skills. These mechanical, teachable skills. And I've always been a quick study.
As soon as Kim had broken up with me, I talked to my therapist just before the first skills class (she runs that, too). I told her I wanted to have a one-on-one appointment to make sure I was experiencing normal feelings, and making good decisions around them. Since she was the therapist that helped me navigate the emotional minefield of the emotional trauma swamp I was stuck in after being groped on the street, My First Sexual Assault™, I knew she'd be able to help me very effectively.
I told my therapist all of this, everything I've written above; and more. About all of the automatic thoughts and how I tried to fight them. How I'd gotten hung up on the skills as being tools to help Kim and I stay together, not just generically good tools for any kind of interaction. How I'd worried that nobody would ever find me sexually desirable, and that maybe no one ever had. How I'd gone to a call for a modeling job (which I then won), while feeling uglier than I'd ever felt in my life. How I wrote most of Queen Anne before and after that appointment.
I told her how I'd realized that I was always going to be unsure, at the end of any future relationship, whether my partner had abandoned me in whole or in part because I was trans. How I'd wandered the house, sobbing, asking myself (and my cats, let's be honest), "why did she do this?" over and over. Just wandering around bawling, babbling, and how Jenn, when I asked her the same thing, had answered, "because it's the best she could do." How I saw the truth of that in that moment, and how my sadness broke like a fever, and I felt more compassionate sorrow for Kim than anguish for myself. For how bad things must have been for her that she felt she had to end our relationship, no matter how much she wanted me.
At one point, my GRS came up. The fact that it's a couple years out. My therapist asked how I felt about that, and I told her. Which is basically that I'm fine with it. That I'm not fine with it, but it's how reality is, and I accept that. That I'm not 17 anymore, and I know that something that's a few years away now will be a few years in my past before I even realize it, and that I'll be okay until I get to it.
I told her that I was expecting emotional responses after a break-up to be like what I saw in movies, because I'd never really been emotionally present to experience my past break-ups. I'd been insulated from them, like I had insulated myself from all other emotional pain. My ideas about how break-ups were supposed to work were rooted in Hollywood fantasy, and nothing more. So I thought the aftermath of the break-up would be profoundly and consistently sad, until it wasn't anymore; until the next plot development, when I'd be profoundly and consistently happy. It was a square wave. All the way down, and then all the way up.
But the reality was more like the long tail ripples in a body of water. The break-up was an emotional seabed quake, massively disrupting my emotional ocean. It was a tsunami. A humongous wave, but still fundamentally just a wave. It went all the way down, and then all the way up. But then it kept going and it went not quite all the way down, and then not quite all the way up. The disruption became less and less severe, but that confused the shit out of me.
I drove to the modeling call feeling really sad and anxious, because I was focused on how much I missed Kim, how badly it hurt, and the song I was writing to express that. I went into the actual interview space itself feeling bright and happy and excited, because I was focused on the amazing and very necessary concept behind Léo Roux as a clothing line. And then I left the interview and returned to deep sadness, and finished writing my song. The next week, I went to my fitting with Leo and Pennie, skipping and squealing on the way out, and then went to Kim's place to pick up the last of my things, and had a 10-minute sobbing meltdown in my car.
"It sounds like you were emotionally present for each of those feelings as they were happening," my therapist said.
"Yeah. Yeah, I guess I was," I answered.
I asked her how I could tell when I was really ready to actually see anyone romantically again. I feel like people have this idea that you shouldn't date, after a break-up, until you're completely over the last person. But when I think about what that would look like in the wake of understanding sadness as a wave system, it would mean never dating again. Kim opened Seattle's doors to me. I will probably spend at least the next several years crying at least a little bit every time I go back to or even pass by any of the places we used to go to together. The places where she took me, into days I never knew.
On the other hand, I have these communication class tools, and I would really like to get to practicing with them with a partner. I want to feel connected and understood, and I want to understand them, too. I told my therapist that I knew I had a void in my chest where Kim used to live. And that I knew that no one else could ever fit there, and that trying to make them would just be awful and unkind to everyone. That jamming them into that space would just keep it from closing up and healing at last. But that I thought that being aware of that would be enough, that I'd be able to monitor myself and my own responses to someone new, and keep them appropriately distant until I was whole again. That as long as I was aware of whether or not I was trying to use someone's affection as a substitute for healing and recovering my own self-esteem, I could avoid making the wrong call. And finally, that I needed to be vigilant about my tendency to worry so much about whether a partner will leave me that I ultimately drive them away, by becoming a quiet shadow of the person they had fallen in love with.
She said that all sounded perfectly reasonable, and that in her estimation, I was insightful enough to manage it capably. After all, a break-up is, as Kim said, "just normal relationship stuff." My little wave lifted me up. And I smiled.
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