13/8/10

eredien: Dancing Dragon (Default)
I figured out this morning, while showering, that what I didn't want to be married. What I wanted was to live together with Rachel for the rest of my life, doing what we wanted, caring for each other, but not feeling responsible for the things she did in her life, and having her not feel responsible for the things I did in mine. I think that the fact that marriage is commonly understood to be the way that people who care about each other live together for a lifetime blinded me to the fact that I didn't actually want the structure of marriage as it was commonly understood, where you also are supposed to take on some large responsibility for the life the other person leads.

I think, in retrospect, that this was utterly obvious. Since I was 14 or so, I've been telling myself metaphorically, and not in a subtle way either, that I didn't want marriage. But I thought that marriage was the only possible way to live with and love the person(s) I cared about, and since I wanted to live with and love the person(s) I cared about, I picked marriage (and the attendant social baggage and responsibilities that came along with it). I confused the socially sanctioned way of living with and loving others for the only possible way of living with and loving others by conflating the two (and I'd been conflating them since I was 14, too, with the same metaphor I used to tell myself that I didn't want marriage).

Wow, no wonder I felt so lonely. I didn't want the socially sanctioned way of having partner(s) for life, but I thought that was the only way to have a partner. I don't necessarily want the socially sanctioned way of having any relationships, but I thought that was the only way to have any relationships.

I am utterly sure I also had this problem with other relationships, too: my friendships, and my family. Why do I have this problem? I think I had it instilled in me by my family that the only permissible relationship to have with them was the socially sanctioned "loving child/parent" relationship, so no wonder I was struggling under a crushing guilt-burden of social sanctions and appearances when the relationship we actually had was not loving at all. Furthermore, once I was finally able to acknowledge that the relationship was actually abusive rather than loving, I still struggled under the guilt-burden of social sanction, unsure what to do with the social-sanction concept now that it was not tethered to the relationship anymore, but social sanction still remained the most important factor in how I understood relationships.

No wonder I worried so much about what everyone else thought of me and my actions--my relationships with myself--if was monitoring that feeling of social sanction, rather than the love present in any actual relationship, all the time. I felt a lot of pressure to take only socially sanctioned actions, be a socially sanctioned person. And I'm just not, most of the time. :D

That was why I was happiest when I was alone--there was no "social" for me to feel was sanctioning me or that I had to monitor for appropriateness. But after I realized I also needed and deserved humane, loving relationships, to get them I kept putting myself into social situations, and during any interaction with any other person I would put all this social sanction pressure on myself, and manufacture it where it didn't exist. Because without social sanction, I couldn't see a relationship as a relationship, since social sanction was what I understood relationships to be.

[Addendum: I think that I started being able to see that relationships were different from social sanctions of relationships when I came out, but since I still had very little idea that what I ought to desire from a relationship was the relationship rather than the relationship+social sanction, wherever any of my relationships were not socially sanctioned I kept trying to make them be, which came at the expense of the relationships and therefore also at my own expense.]

This is really important. I feel really freed and happy.
eredien: Dancing Dragon (Default)
The meatloaf analogy

In [livejournal.com profile] rm's journal, [livejournal.com profile] trinker wrote a comment about how surviving abuse makes people abjectly grateful for whatever they get.

I wanted to expand on that a little, and wanted to put it in a place where I could talk about how that was rekevant to my own situation right now.

To [livejournal.com profile] trinker's comment, I would add to this that it makes people abjectly grateful for whatever they get--even if they don't want it, even if they detest it, even if getting it is actively bad for them. And when people are told and believe that they should be grateful for getting things that are bad for them over and over again, they generally end up not being able to articulate what it is that would actually be good for them, because they have never had the opportunity to have something that was good for them, whether they got it for themselves or had other people give it to them.

When you are starving for food, and someone hands you meatloaf, you are going to eat it even if you don't like meatloaf. You are going to eat it even if you are allergic to meatloaf, if you are hungry enough. And if all that the people who cook for you know how to make is meatloaf, you are eventually going to learn to eat and probably cook meatloaf, even if you don't want it. Then, once you've learned to eat it all the time without throwing up, you will start to wonder if you really do like meatloaf--after all, you're eating it all the time.

Then, you learn that other people eat other things--beans, squash, fish, ice cream, sometimes even meatloaf. At first you are surprised--people eat a variety of things? You spend a while adjusting to that idea, and then you go to the kitchen and tell the chef about pumpkins and they say, "but my meatloaf is the very best!" or "sorry, I don't know how to make salad; you'll have to make do with meatloaf!" or "you don't like my meatloaf? Fine! Don't eat tonight, then!" or "but you've been eating my meatloaf your whole life, so you must like it--and look at how healthy you are! " These last two arguments are quite convincing, because you a.) don't want to stave, and b.) you yourself were already wondering if maybe your hatred for meatloaf was irrational--it reinforces that self-doubt that was already there. You never stopped to wonder if you could have become more healthy if you ate soup instead: for one thing, you'd never had the opportunity to try soup because you'd never had it in your kitchen. And for another, you had no reason to think that eating something else would fix the problem, since when other people said they ate other things and were "normally healthy" you assumed that meant that they were constantly sick, since that was "normally healthy" for you and everyone who you knew, since you all ate from the same kitchen.

But then you finally figure out that maybe you should to learn how to cook.

You go to the cook and ask to use the kitchen, but they won't let you make anything other than meatloaf; so you have to go elsewhere to learn to cook.

There are three options from that point.

ExpandPlease read below the LJ cut, this is cut only for length and not for importance. )

I have been--am--guilty of this fundamental selfishness, in terms of relationships. I think that is because I believed that the only permissible way to live with and love others in a relationship--and in turn be lived with and be loved by those others--was the already socially sanctioned way of showing those things. Which is just not true.

Which is probably why I spent a lot of time in the past six months deconstructing arguments against gay marriage and following the news about worldwide queer rights and Prop 8--I was using my thoughts about what was actually happening as a tool to try and work through my feelings about the social sanction of marriage. After the first few months, I was even able to articulate to myself that I was using all that reading and writing as a tool to get to something else, a means to an end, but I wasn't quite sure what end I was looking for. (I was so crushed when the prop 8 victory was handed down a day before R. and I broke up, but the reason I was crushed didn't make sense to me--we had never planned on getting married in CA anyway, so why would the timing have such an affect on me and my relationship, personally? Turns out I was crushed because the social sanction aspect so central to the case was something that I had really believed I needed to have a happy, loving relationship, and at the very point that that social sanction was making global news headlines, I no longer had a happy, loving relationship for those sanctions to apply to). It was that reading and writing and thinking that led me to realize that I didn't actually want or need those social sanctions to have a loving relationship, and further led me to realize that my insistence on those sanctions was what led me to ignore my own idea of what I actually wanted, which led me to destroy the loving relationship I actually had going on already. [After some reflection, I don't think that I destroyed the relationship, and I don't think it was the pressure for social sanction that led it to be destroyed. I do however, think that my insistence on the sanction let me to ignore what I wanted.]
This is not to say that other people shouldn't want or need social sanctions, because I think the vast majority of people do, and deserve them. I will continue to fight for gay marriage. I just won't continue to fight for it for me anymore, because it's not what I want.

(The meatloaf analogy, BTW, is both a metaphorical and a literal analogy--I'm vegan and I literally get the "wow, this is so good but it's so weird, I don't think I could eat it every day; are you sure you don't want steak--and you aren't losing any weight, are you?" with every family dinner for which I make and bring my own food. (When I was a preteen and decided to become pescatarian, my parents forbid me from buying and/or cooking my own food at home. I would eat what they cooked and pick out the bits of meat. I survived a year on frozen/canned side-dish vegetables, pasta, and McDonald's caesar salads, before I realized that I could not get enough protein without the tofu that I could not buy or cook, and went back to eating meat for my own long-term health.) The whole point of bringing the food in the first place is to enable me to make the food choices that are right for me, and stay emotionally and physically healthy by doing so), but my mom just complains that eating fish would make me healthier and feels bad that I won't eat her turkey gravy, and my dad won't try anything made of tofu at all, though I think he had three slices of vegan cake).

I am pretty sure this is why I have problems with food--I didn't like the food I was being given, but didn't have an opportunity to eat kind of food I wanted much, wasn't allowed to have my own diet when I found out my ideal foods were radically different from those of the people around me, and was told my choices were invalid so began to doubt my own ideas about what I liked and whether my food opinions were just totally invalid.

I am pretty sure this is why I have problems with relationships--I didn't have an opportunity to get much attention as a kid, and didn't like what attention I was given. But when I expressed this, I was told that it was not acceptable to ask for or want different kinds of affection, because the kinds of attention I was given were the kinds they could give, and the prevailing socially sanctioned idea my parents and I had of love was "the parents will love to the best of their ability, and since that is all they can do, the child will know and feel loved" -- even though that doesn't really follow. Even when I found out that my ideal forms of getting attention and expressing love and affection were acceptable to ask for from people who weren't my parents, I still didn't have a good understanding of what kinds of attention I did want, or if I wanted attention at all, or if I wanted it how to get it or give my own.

I think this problem, though, has gone a long way toward being solved in the past decade. Some highlights: I learned a lot about what kind of types of affection I actually wanted and about what kinds were no good for me. I learned that it was ok to desire them, and to ask for them. I learned how to say "no" and "yes" when someone gave them to me, and mean it. I learned it was ok to say "I don't know," and wait. I learned it was ok to have and pursue dreams and goals and desires for myself beyond "what I desire in my relationships." I learned it was ok to have and pursue dreams and goals and desires for myself within my relationships. I learned it was ok for others to have and pursue dreams and goals and desires in their relationships. I learned it was ok for others to have and pursue dreams and goals and desires for themselves beyond "what they desire in their relationships."

All those things are really important.

March 2016

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