Enough Is Enough

By Maria Padhila

I believe I must be predisposed for sadness this time of year. There was always the dismal prospect of another year of school, plus long nights, dead food, shivering. Then the fall kicks off Isaac’s busiest work and play season; and most recently the season has piled on, like another heap of dead leaves, Chris’s departure for Burning Man.

It feels like everyone else is doing the equivalent of buying new clothes and notebooks and cheering their team against a bright blue sky, and I’m… going back to school. Sitting in the library as the Sun sets and the fluorescent light sharpens, getting colder and hungrier and of course — alone. Me and the books, thank goodness for them.

A woman with two lovers and a beloved child and a few good friends who will forgive her nearly anything, alone? Well, there’s no appealing to rationality when one is living in that feeling that there is not enough. It’s a feeling common to polyamorous people, counter-intuitively — after all, isn’t poly all about getting more? But it carries the flip side of zero-sum thinking: If there’s more for him or her, it’s clear that means there’s less for me.

I feel very lonely. And I have no “reason” to.

I realized that what was operating in me was very much like a dietary deficiency. You crave and crave, because your body is in a state of panic. But all the bread in the world won’t fill you when what you’re missing is zinc or B-12.

I’m deficient in the feeling that others take pleasure in my presence, that they look forward to being with me, that I’m enough for them. Someone feeding me whole-wheat-bread compliments such as how they rely on me (snooozzzeee) doesn’t fill it. Hearing in great detail how much effort they’re making to get away from me and go do something fun somewhere else, well… that’s actively depleting that mineral, leaving me demoralized. Basically, as Tim Robbins sang in Bull Durham, I’m “getting wooly … because of all the stress.”

Here’s what I wrote to Isaac the other day — texted him as I stood waiting in line at the Safeway salad bar. Really, you never know what’s going on at the next cell phone over (unless you’re in the NSA). When we start falling into the place where our only communications are “did you do this, did you handle that,” and he falls into triple-Virgo micromanagement mode, we end up blowing the whistle:

I really wish we could help each other more day-to-day, but the reality is we usually lack full information and often have different short-term goals. The primary ways I need help is through you giving me empathy, kindness, and enjoyment of my presence. This is all I want from people around me. I can take care of most of the rest. What do you need most?

Jesus, no wonder no one takes pleasure in my presence. How tiresome. But anyway, the point is: it’s not a matter of Not Enough. It’s a problem of Not the Right Stuff.

In search of more insight into the poly-but-lonely issue, I looked to the ever-perspicacious Franklin Veaux, who has been in the game and sharing what he’s learned for years, currently on his More than Two site. Among all the Poly 101 documents, there’s this:

When you’re involved in any non-traditional relationship model, it can sometimes be tempting to blame every problem you may encounter on that model. This seems particularly true in polyamory, where it might be easy and tempting to blame the polyamory for whatever trouble you may encounter — “If we weren’t poly, we wouldn’t have to deal with this!”

But that’s not necessarily so. Even traditional, monogamous relationships face their fair share of challenges and difficulties.

For example, if you’re in a poly relationship and you feel that you aren’t getting enough of your partner’s attention, it might be tempting to say, “If you weren’t also involved with so-and-so, I wouldn’t be feeling neglected.” But in any relationship, situations exist that may distract your lover’s attention — work, family, and so on. The problem in this case isn’t really polyamory — it’s time management.

Isolating the root cause of the problem, rather than simply blaming the problem on polyamory, is an excellent way to resolve relationship difficulties.

After looking this up, I saw that Veaux and his partner are putting out a book with the collected wisdom of their years. I am not a big fan of soliciting and collecting money online, and I only support a VERY few such campaigns. But this is one worth supporting, if you’re poly or care about relationship and sexual expression freedom and equality. Veaux is a balanced, considered, careful source as well as being entertaining to read. He’s not afraid to admit when he learns something or changes his mind; he’s open and has a good values set. And he’s funny.

But what clinched it for me was going to the latest blog and seeing that his partner, Eve Rickert, is all of the above and more. Hers is the kind of writing that puts truth and beauty together. This is going to be a book well worth helping see the light of day. Here’s a piece from her latest blog post, under a photo of her tattoo, which reads “But within that inch we are free”:

It’s a quote from V for Vendetta, by Alan Moore:

“But it was my integrity that was important. Is that so selfish? It sells for so little, but it’s all we have left in this place. It is the very last inch of us. But within that inch we are free…”

The story behind the tattoo is long, but it deals with a very dark time and place in my life — a time when I had no good choices, most of the time. For a long time, my integrity was all I had left, and all I had to guide me. If you know you can’t win, and the people you care about can’t either, and the consequences of any choice you make are completely unpredictable anyway, what do you do? For me, it was hold my head up, put one foot in front of another, and make whatever choice in each moment was the one with integrity.

It seems like those times when you have no good choices, when you can’t win (and no one else can, either) do have a tendency to crop up in polyamorous relationships. We can talk about negotiation and compromise and finding win-win solutions, but sometimes those happy mediums just aren’t available. Or maybe it’s just that you can’t see them. Maybe it’s because the more people’s needs and personalities you put in the mix, the more likely conflicts are to arise, and some of those conflicts only seem to have solutions where everyone has to give something up.

Franklin and I are founding the book on an ethical framework focused on maximizing well-being for everyone involved. But sometimes that does mean minimizing losses rather than maximizing gains, and no matter how you reason your way through it, it feels like crap to make choices that you know are going to hurt people, just because you hope that down the line, they’re going to hurt less than the other choices you could make. And sometimes you genuinely can’t tell: sometimes the long-term effects of your choices are impossible to see, and so you’re faced with a set of choices that feel lousy in the short term and whose long-term effects can’t be predicted.

So when that happens — if you can’t make a move without hurting yourself or someone else — how do you make your choices?

“An inch. It’s small and it’s fragile and it’s the only thing in the world worth having. We must never lose it, or sell it, or give it away. We must never let them take it from us.”

Honey, you didn’t have to make a video or be the featured player on the website to get me to cough up my few bucks. All you had to do was write — that made it clear enough to me. That inch (and of course now I’m thinking of Hedwig) is where I live, where my bitterest, truest voice, the voice in my poems, comes from. It’s the one that speaks of the reality of how trapped we are, the one that brazenly admits how few choices we have and how few of these are good — and how heroic it is that some people find the courage to find that inch to stand on.

This is something I wrote last year around this time of the Exodus for the Desert. It’s written from that inch, the place of being true to feeling unwanted and abandoned, and tells something of what I’ve discovered in my own desert. I’ve been having a lot of pain and numbness in my hands and feet, and this makes me realize it’s been more than a year that this has been going on.

Broadcast

When my finger rips the paper packet
Seeds burst out all over my hands, no matter,
You always say it’s better
Scattershot. These hands, oh how I wish
These were not my hands, crabbed
And cracked, their grace a ghost.

All so tiny, so tiny, I wouldn’t know where
They fall even if my eyes could make out
Where they fall. What kind of seed
Would demand a fall planting?
I’ll buy the lie of freshening air,
Pretend this is a place fit to begin.

There, there, find a niche, little spill,
Frost, earth heave and crack–
They say you want to be broken like that.
It’s hard to believe. In summer,
Skin-thin wrinkled petals, a fat
Sac of sap. If this works, next fall,
Your pain will be nothing and your vision
Brilliant and it will feel like it will never end.