I write this piece from a meditative place today.
I honor the space I am trying to create. I honor all the versions of me that have survived to be present with now. I honor who I will become after this writing. I honor all who read it and give me the time of day to be seen, not just understood. I honor all of life’s cycles just as they are, and therefore, me as I am amidst them. I am present.
I also write with a heavy, weighted heart that feels full of wisdom yet.
*takes a deep breath and exhales*
The past few years have been hell and heaven alike. I have had the worst moments of my life in them and some of the most divine, life changing ones. I have cried more than I even knew I could cry, lost more in several years’ time than I even thought possible, and am still managing to stand as I am.
I feel it was all necessary, though. I feel lighter in my body than I ever have, more connected with my sense of purpose and capacity, and more alive. I feel most me, in an entirely unpredicted way.
Today, I would like to share all the ways I have become me in this moment. I feel it important to document, to release, and to to share with those I love and feel comfortable with.
I have not been my best self online at times. I am not proud of some of the ways I have expressed myself in this time. I deleted my Facebook to continue on my journey towards communing with my greatest sense of being.
I have struggled with oversharing my personal matters in what I felt at the time was an artful way. I love raw, bold, clarifying art. I love pure honesty. I think it helps us grow when we are real with each other.
I did not present myself as best I could at times, though, and learned a thing or two about the power of privacy. That is just as artful a practice. Not to mention, it’s just simply confusing to others when I am confused in my own expression, and that is a nuance I don’t think I quite have time to unpack at the moment.
Needless to say, I wanted to share these things today for clarification as well. Maybe it will make sense, maybe it won’t entirely, and I am comfortably letting go of the need to feel perfectly understood at all moments with my words. I just simply want to be seen and to use my voice to do that today.
*I breathe and release all past versions of myself that needed to do this to survive. I move into my greater self in this moment.*
This is going to be very hard, and possibly very confusing, for some. I apologize that it won’t be simple. Trauma never is, and if you are prepared to walk this journey with me today, you are someone capable of knowing that truth. I honor your capacity and thank you deeply.
I got a divorce a few years ago. Sorry, dissolution of divorce. We finalized it about 6 months ago.
I could not get myself out of bed and into the court to do it for a long time, but I wanted to be the one to take the official step.
When I was 22, I got married. It was a lovely marriage in so many ways. By all counts, I married my best friend. I was in love. I saw the future together. I don’t know that I would have left them had there not been longterm issues and concerns.
Whilst we dated, I began to realize something was very wrong swimming around in me personally. I started experiencing the clarifying sensation that something had happened to me in my childhood that I could not remember. I can’t remember so very much of my childhood and that seemed like a joke to me for awhile, until I was out on my own for the first time. It stopped being funny.
Sex became hard for me. I felt like a failure, I felt incapable of providing for my partner’s needs, I felt like a broken, washed up piece of dissociating nothingness that shouldn’t be struggling with something I wanted.
I entered therapy when I was 24 and began working on myself. My struggle with sexual intimacy was approached from every angle - maybe I’m gay, maybe it’s the religious trauma, maybe I’m overthinking sex, maybe I should just try more, maybe I should expect my partner to blow up when they feel rejected because I’m making a bigger deal out of this than there is.
Those therapists did damage. In couple’s therapy, we approached our mutual therapist with an incident that had occurred between us in year one. We were both sincerely curious to know if my partner’s behavior had impacted me as a reason for why I was pulling away. She told me it would never hold up in a court of law and I was being unfair to put that on my partner, despite that not being the question we had both asked. I felt small and voiceless.
We switched therapists and our first session? “You mean hell yes is yes? Sometimes therapists can do damage too and that must have been so invalidating to hear. Martina, I would like you to tell me how you want these sessions to be guided and what you would like me to work on with your partner in our private sessions. You are guiding this ship.”
She helped me work on noticing my dissociation, approached my sexuality with tenderness, prided me on setting boundaries in my marriage that I direly needed, and very gently, so so very gently and expertly guided me through a few EMDR sessions.
I began working on my memory.
I started having a panic attack when we targeted something I did remember.
2 weeks later, we found a place in Columbus.
My last session with her was so very saddening. I knew I needed to continue this journey with her, but I also knew a good deal on a place was a good deal when it presented itself, despite the knowledge I was uprooting my life for someone I was in therapy with. I cried the night before that session and the whole way home. I still miss her to this day.
After we moved, my grandfather-in-law passed away. He was my grandpa by all accounts. In some ways, I’m glad he never knew my partner and I broke up. I’m still spinning records and it reminds me of him sometimes.
Not long after, I met someone and my partner also met someone. We had years prior been preparing to open our relationship. It felt like right timing to explore separately but simultaneously.
The person I met immediately respected my sexual boundaries and needs. One very early conversation with them changed my life. I realized how much of a choice it could be to believe others and I realized that I was not capable of maintaining relationship with someone that had hurt me and only after years of bickering, sought the change I needed. I broke up with my marital partner three months after moving.
My newly met partner and I fell madly in love. I was absolutely crazy about them in every way. We had the gentlest, sweetest, goofiest dynamic. I realized I was not bisexual but a lesbian in this relationship. (That started feeling apparent to me as my marital partner came to terms with being trans as well). I worked the hardest I have ever worked on a relationship in that one. Our communication was seamless, our desire for secure attachment was met. So many things went right that I couldn’t even name if I tried to.
About 6 months into this relationship, one of their partners behaved in a way that was extremely triggering to me and at my attempt to set some basic privacy boundaries, my partner told me I was projecting what I had just been through onto the polycule and being possessive and jealous.
I was not ready to let go of this relationship, and would not fully let it go for some time after we broke up two months later. I felt broken, vulnerable, and so so very confused.
Therapy language had been flipped around on me, my years and years worth of work in therapy seemingly meant nothing, my polyamorous orientation was called into question, and my trust in being respected was shattered. I had spent almost two months time in therapy preparing to respectfully ask for boundaries to a broken promise.
I had spent years working up the strength to leave my longterm relationship and the reality that being in such a vulnerable place in a new relationship was not good for me had finally caught up. My partner had joked that they liked knowing I was struggling because it made them feel good about themself and having to actually face that reality was the hardest thing I have ever had to do.
I cried every day the week before I broke up with them. I was in and out of the bathroom at work. I made a plan of self care for the weekend following the conversation I was prepared to have.
It was sweet, and tender. I wrote them a poem, expressed my concerns with how my needs had gone unaddressed, and hugged them goodbye. That night, they sent me one last text I was not expecting and my world crumbled all over again. I paced my room and was unable to blink in a grief stricken state of panic. It felt like I had ripped a limb off and little did I understand, but that text changed the course of everything.
I kept texting them for weeks after we broke up and re-opening the wound over and over and over again. I had little control at all of my impulses.
At my friends’ concerns, I finally let them go in all capacities and got myself on Lexapro. I had been experiencing suicidal thoughts and spiraling into an identity crisis before we had even broken up - after those horrible things had been said to me. My partner was quite pregnant at the time, however, and I simply could not bring myself to make them aware of the impact of their actions. With Lexapro on my side, though, it was time to take care of myself for me, not for anyone else. Once stabilized, I was still full of a rage I could not place nor express. I now understand this to be the reality that I was in a situation I could not be honest about after I had worked myself up to honesty. I struggled to not go completely internal and nonverbal. I’m still wrestling with using my voice like I used to to this day.
I have had days glued to my bed in extremely depressive states, moments of dissociating so intensely it scared me, and so many panic attacks in a row I had to leave work.
Since then, I have been taken advantage of as I’ve helped other people, my wallet stolen, and then car stolen after my previous one broke down on the road to Oregon. Those cars were points of pride in my supporting-myself- post-divorce era.
My apartment has new holes in the floor and tears on the wall I will lose my deposit over.
One night, I went to kiss my partner goodbye and one of my neighbors yelled “That’s so hot, can I join in?” I have seen a man verbally abusing his wife in the middle of the street in broad daylight, and my neighborhood has told me to just get over it or get involved.
If you are reading this and consider yourself an activist etc, I would like you to consider what that means to you.
Do I owe it to people to share my very intense and tumultuous trauma and mental health journey just to be seen as caring? The world isn’t ready for that intersection and I know that, but do other people?
Is it easy to bring yourself to a protest when you’re glued to your bed? I made myself go, but it wasn’t easy. Was I visible enough? Was I loud enough? Did anyone see me?
Is it easy to feel safe as a (visibly) single AFAB person anywhere I go now? I make myself go places but I don’t feel safe ever, not fully, not the way a cis man would. I made empowered decisions to be single - do I not care about the world around me because I am struggling to keep my head above water on my own some days?
Is it a privilege to not know if I’m real some days because I’m dissociating out of my control? If I have gone nonverbal, unable to articulate what is happening to me, does that make me callous because I cannot speak? Am I being selfish in taking a step back to heal, knowing that I am not a good candidate for leading activist campaigns and putting myself in harm’s way on any front line? If I have also suffered community trauma, does that mean I am holding out my natural leadership skills when I say that I cannot involve myself in most spaces right now?
What does activism mean if it’s all virtue signaling and proving oneself instead of mutually working towards liberation for all of us?
Do none of us deserve refuge at times we most need it? Is capitalism also subsuming activism up into itself, requiring productivity to build trust? Where is the sense of ableism in that?
I have a new therapist and we are working our way to picking up where my EMDR journey left off some 2.5 years ago. She helps me see that I can trust myself and my body’s instincts. I feel less alone with her, and I am finally doing okay, I think.
My marital ex and I are okay. I do not know how to explain it but I believe them when they say they are being a better person. I truly do. It is not my responsibility to rehabilitate. I can stand in some sense of humanity, I suppose, with honorable promises to do better and be better.
My last ex and their partners made a podcast about 6 months ago smearing me not in name, but in rewriting the narrative as enlightened polyamorous thinkers. What does activism mean if it’s all virtue signaling and proving oneself instead of mutually working towards liberation for all of us?
I am still healing, though. In so very many ways, I am healing.
🙏
