(No) Trigger Warning

Fallout 4 and weird personal garbage have been really wrecking my posting schedule. Sorry!

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Yesterday was a mess for me. More accurately, I was a mess. Before I get to the (I now realize) triggering event yesterday morning, let me set the stage for why it was a trigger at all.

In the first semester my senior year of college I met a guy named Alex through the local Houston area chatroom on AOL. (Yes, even though it was the year 2007, I was still participating in AOL chatrooms – don’t judge me)

We met up – we were attracted to each other – we boned down pretty quickly.

I won’t get into the particulars of the relationship, but let me just say that when I met him he was a pretty regular pot smoker, but he was employed, had just moved into a new apartment, and was pretty attentive and could take care of his own shit. By the time the relationship ended a mere 2 months later, he was pretty much ripping on his bong every 5 minutes, had lost his job, had relied on me to buy him cigarettes, had trashed his apartment by inviting idiots over constantly, and had started using heroin.

One very surreal, and very poignant “What the fuck am I doing with my life?” moments was when I was sitting on his couch while his stripper friend was preparing her heroin. I watched, in mute horror and fascination, as she deftly completed the entire process from the spoon to injection. I was about to graduate from a prestigious university, and I’m sitting in a shitty apartment while a stripper was shooting up heroin. And my boyfriend was snorting it off his coffee table.

Shortly after that, the day of reckoning came.

My car started smoking while I was driving around doing something for a school assignment with my BFF. I ended up getting a pretty nasty burn on my arm, and got coolant in my eyes, as when I opened the hood, the coolant cap flew off and sprayed coolant steam everywhere. Luckily I’d had 2 gallon bottles of water in the trunk, which my buddy used to pour into my eyes, and then took me into the Auto Zone we’d pulled into in order to use their eyewash station.

I called Alex to pick us up – and after he dropped my friend off at the school, he took me with him to his place. We hung out – then went over to his parents’, who gave me a snipping off their aloe plant for my burn. He was playing the attentive boyfriend – which was pretty awesome.

Later that night, after he’d passed out, I signed into AOL and was chatting in the local chatroom and casually mentioned the chaos of the day, including Alex’s heroics, when some other women in the chatroom started harassing me and calling me a liar and that Alex wasn’t dating ME. That they had been sexting with him earlier that day, and he was saying that he loved them, and all this other stuff. I didn’t bring it up to him that night, as he had already passed out. But I then proceeded to engage in the only act of snooping I’d ever done before (or since), and I checked his phone. And sure as shit… explicit messages with other women.

Keep in mind – I was not poly at this point in time. We were in a relationship, and it was supposed to be monogamous. Plus, all these women who knew him apparently had never heard of me…

So, my mind was racing as I crawled into bed next to him, tossing and turning until I eventually fell asleep trying to figure out how I was going to bring this up.

In the morning, he drove me to school in his loud truck for my first class and the ride was pretty silent between us, but not unpleasant. I didn’t bring up anything about the ladies in the chatroom or my suspicions. I confirmed that he’d pick me up after my meeting that afternoon ended at 1:30pm, gave him a kiss, and went to class.

Fast Forward: It’s now 2:00pm, and I’m sitting outside in the 90 degree Houston October, and there is no sign of Alex. I’ve tried texting him a few times, and no answer. I tried calling, thinking maybe he’d fallen asleep. By the time 2:30pm rolled around, I’m freaking out because I think something has happened to him. In hindsight, I realize he was probably tipped off by that point about what I’d learned the night before.

So there I am, everyone I know has left the premises, and I’m in flip-flops and staring down a 5 mile trek home, having to cross several very unpleasantly congested roads. With tears streaming down my face, I start walking. I call every 5-10 minutes, thinking maybe he just fell asleep. Maybe he just didn’t hear the phone that time.

By the time I get home, my toes are scraped and blistered, I’m sweating bullets, and I’m a wreck.

It gets to be about 6 pm with no word, and I call up a friend to take me to my car at the Auto Zone, where it’s been since the day before. On the drive to the Auto Zone, I get a single text from Alex:

“You’ve called me 50 times – you’re crazy.”

I’m not going to go into major detail about all the crazy things I did at that point. Going to his apartment and seeing him through his window hanging out with a chick he’d spent ages talking shit about. Going to his parents’ house to see if they could talk some sense into him.

I was enraged. How could HE dump ME?! I hadn’t done anything wrong! I’d basically been taking care of him – having cleaned up several times when he’d puked all over and on himself, buying him groceries, buying him cigarettes, doing his dishes…

The next few weeks were hell for me. He, or one of his friends, had placed an Ad on craigslist and were giving out my number. I received dozens of phone calls daily. I didn’t want to change my phone number, because in those days it wasn’t smart phones and transferring contacts – changing your number was such a hassle, and I hoped that it would blow over. It took almost a month before they stopped. He knew where I lived, and I was terrified that they would start giving out my address – and even though it had a security gate, I worried someone would slip in behind another person in the community and do something to my apartment.

It was all so traumatic and frightening that I withdrew from school that semester and went back home, 1500 miles away, just to feel safe.

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So all of this leads to yesterday morning with boyfriend. I’d made an ass of myself the night before, and just generally felt like an idiot for trying to hang when I’m just not that hardcore.

The morning wake-up routine was kind of rushed, not much chatting, not much discussion about what was going on. He wasn’t doing so great because he’s got swimmer’s ear, and was going through the uncomfortable process of dealing with that.

The ride with him was mostly quiet, though there was some light conversation as he was driving me in his loud Jeep to drop me off at my car. We get to my car, and I tell him I love him and give him a kiss.

And as he’s pulling out of the parking lot and I’m fiddling with my phone and setting up my road tunes, this giant wave of anxiety hits me OUT OF NOWHERE.

All of yesterday I was freaking out and couldn’t handle anything and couldn’t figure out what triggered it. I mean, I know I was PMSing (and still am), but it didn’t make any sense.

I was sobbing as I got in bed last night, as he hadn’t been terribly responsive, and I’d been throwing walls of text at him most of the day. I was trying to pin point what was causing all of the anxiety. I’m talking to my husband, I’m talking to my best friend, I’m talking to my FWB. And it wasn’t until almost midnight, and I was in the lower most depths of my spiral that I remembered that loud truck ride to school, and the chaos that followed.

Everything clicked into place – my anxiety and worry were brought about by something akin to a flashback. It wasn’t anything I did, or that boyfriend did. It was my brain sending me back to 8 years ago and sending up alarm bells about “We know how this ends, girl! Watch out!”

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Trauma is a fucking asshole.

What Does Poly Have to Do With Vidya Games?

Apologies for the lapse in posting – I’ve been sick and hopped up on cold medicine, and coherency has not been my forte as of late.

Should have a few posts in the chamber this week, though! Enjoy!

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I would consider myself poly-flexible. I didn’t come to it naturally, but it always made intellectual sense to me.

I was thinking about it the other day, and it dawned on me that my approach to poly in my life almost exactly mirrors my approach to creating characters in video games.

Let’s use World of Warcraft as the model here.

When I first started playing WoW, I had no idea what I was doing! I created a Mage and just screwed around and learned the game. I didn’t bother trying anything else, and I wasn’t even interested! I had limited video gaming time, and I was going to invest that time developing this one character to be the best it could be!

Years went by before a situation arose where playing a Mage was not in the best interest of what was trying to be accomplished (such as needing an additional healer for a raiding guild, etc.). So I still maintained my Mage, and she was still my main, and she was AWESOME and burning up the DPS charts, and she was just an extension of myself – but I began developing my Priest!

That Priest was a lot of fun, but every time I got an achievement while playing her (and was super excited about the achievement!), I was somewhat disappointed that my Mage was missing out on that achievement, too.

Sometimes an expansion would come out that was absolutely brutal for Mages, either in terms of solo questing, or raiding DPS, and I’d create other characters just to try them out and level them to max level.

But there my Mage was, always calling to me. Reminding me of those early days of exploration. She’s who taught me the game, through trial and error and dumb newbie mistakes. And every time a new expansion came out, she was the first character to make it to max level and get the cool gear.

I would then seek to level other characters, but I just never invested as much enthusiasm with them. I’d get them all to max level (by the most recent expansion I couldn’t even do that, because I’d gotten 8 different classes to max level during the previous expansion, and I was BURNED OUT!) They’d always lag slightly behind my main, except in extremely lucky loot drop scenarios sometimes my Priest would come out ahead for a while (she seems to be my home away from home).

Some people talk about managing to switch main characters later on in the game – they’d played a Warlock for years or something and then during one expansion they tried out Paladin tanking and fell in love and abandoned their beloved Warlock. That always made me sad. Regardless whether the expansion was ruthless with nerfs – my Mage would still be what I consider my main character, even to this day.

If I were to go out and buy the newest expansion and fire up the game again, Ajatara the Draenei Mage would be waiting there for me, and I would be so happy to relearn the game all over again with her.

My poly life seems to mirror this. I enjoy meeting new people (creating new characters) and developing relationships (leveling them), but my husband has been there through so much, and taught me so much that he has become synonymous with how I live my life (my main). And it sounds hierarchical, and it sounds like no one could ever be him – and I think for me, that’s true. It’s not on purpose. I’m not LIMITING other people or my relationships with them – this is just how my brain naturally works. I hitched my wagon to my husband, and we’ve built our life together, and I want to keep our life together until one of us kicks it.

Ajatara can’t do everything, though. She can’t heal. She can’t tank. And I like doing those other things, too.

And seriously – I absolutely LOVE playing my Priest (She’s a red-headed human named Hymnpossible, because puns within cartoon references are the BEST). She’s always the second character I level to max after a new expansion hits. I would never abandon her or leave her unleveled during an expansion, and I play her almost as much as Ajatara. But she’s not Ajatara. She does different, awesome things, and provides a different experience, but Ajatara is like my home.

(I’d say my boyfriend is totally my Priest)

(And my current FWB would be my Paladin, because wrecking faces is just FUN)

Right, wrong, or indifferent, that’s how my brain chooses to allocate my attention and time resources, whether we’re talking romantic relationships or video games.

 

 

 

Also…For the Alliance! 😉

This is why I can’t have nice things…

I’m a certifiable nut case.

The more that goes right in my life, the more spectacularly I decide to blow it all to smithereens. It’s likely I’m incapable of accepting that good things can happen to me, whether or not I believe I’ve “earned” them or not.

I particularly cannot handle things that are going well that I do not believe I deserve or have earned.

I start to push at things. I start to pull the threads. I start to test the strength of these new found good things – and when it’s a relationship, it’s particularly heinous. I just cannot seem to accept that anyone in their right mind actually likes and/or loves me and is willingly choosing to spend their time with me when there are so many other things and people they could be out experiencing.

And so when I’m in these moods, I start to pick apart what people say. I start examining motives. I start picking up on what they’re NOT saying. I start replaying every conversation and moment spent together. I start trying to figure out why they’re spending their time doing other things instead of trying to spend every available moment with me. And it’s INSANE. And I don’t know how to stop this train once it starts rolling.

I become grumpy. I become short. I start disparaging myself to them. I start trying to get them to agree that I’m a horrible, terrible human being that they don’t want to spend time with. I BECOME a horrible, terrible human being that no one wants to spend time with, and then I can point and say HA! SEE!

WHY?! Why do I do this? Why am I always second guessing other people’s opinions of me? Is it because I know what’s going on in my head, and the mess that lurks there, and if they knew what was happening up there they certainly wouldn’t think anything remotely good about me?

Do I really need as much verbal affirmation as I think I do to feel safe and confident? How do I ask for that without coming across as a supremely insecure child?

I’ve been avoiding blogging because of several things over the past weekend. Most good, and some bad. The past 2 days have been because of this insecurity eating away at me, exacerbated by this horrid illness that has completely thrown me off at work, as well. Nobody wants to hear this garbage – this isn’t LiveJournal after all.

I had a post I wanted to write about jealousy and where it’s coming from and how I’m learning to deal with that in my new relationship, but I just couldn’t motivate myself to sit down and write it because I could already feel myself tearing at the threads of that relationship.

I’m not sure what to do, at this point. I just know that if I continue down the path that I’m on, my brain is going to burn it all to the ground and then shrug and say “See, I told you that you couldn’t handle it. This is why you’re not allowed to have nice things.”

I don’t want to burn everything to the ground again, but I can already feel my brain rooting around for the gasoline.