Episode 71: I Have No Idea

360 DAYS STRAIGHT!!! MAYBE A GOOD LONG HUG WILL FIX IT!!! This is me, over here, in my lane… A WEEKEND THAT DIDN’T NEED TO HAPPEN!!! Or do we jump in a pit of ACTUAL DRAGONS!!! DELUSIONAL OPTIMISM!!! & I AM FAILING.

Excerpt from the show:

“Soooo….. I’m back. Again. From my boss fight. And I am here to report that it went surprisingly well. It was not without its dramatic moments, but in the end I won. And that’s mostly what mattered. Sometimes it is about the destination folks. Because you know what. I’m one slip of paper away from being a LICENSED SEXOLOGIST specializing in lineage-based Tibetan healing, and somatic modalities. All I need is to send my credentials in to some boards, and there it is. Woof boy do I feel out of practice at this, it’s been weeks of radio silence (well actually re-runs). I have a lot of hot gossip for you, a lot to break down and process for myself, and well you should know by now, I’m going to give it all to you, every last bit, well maybe not the super sexy bits because you know that’s not exactly Pg-13 radio content. But most of the bits. Ok so not every last bit, that was a lie. But you get to hear all about the impacts, the emotional gut punches, and the infamous tell-all. And then I’ll be back to bareing my whole soul to you every week on the airwaves. Who’s excited? Well, currently not me. I am a twisted tangled mess of emotions and conflicts and I’m here to unwind it with you. We will see if I manage to talk myself to a place of clarity at some point in this show. First I should start by saying anyone who had a running bet on how long it would take me and my roommate/childhood best friend/high school boyfriend to sleep together again, won somewhere around mid-October…. Yep, you called it, and boy did I not see that coming. I really did delusionally think it wouldn’t get complicated. Silly me. That girl from a month ago was so naïve so full of optimism and sexual frustration. Such a winning combo. So that happened one night we got a little too comfortable on the couch watching tv and there it was, a kiss that split it all open. Every old wound and growth edge we would come up against. Every story we had constructed in the years we had spent apart, about who we were, what our patterns were, and how we approached relationships. So the question, the highly debated question there was. Do we attempt to heal this, do we set the game too hard and try to play this level, or do we take it back and pretend it never happened? Or do we jump into the pit of actual dragons, and see if we can defeat them all in time to keep our heads? Wanna guess what we did? We decided to battle the dragons, or giant metal robots (we’ve been playing horizon zero dawn) and see what happened. And we have definitely had some wins, some magic moments of reconnection and creation of safety, and some losses and disconnections and moments of frustration and worry. But I think that was just par for the course. Not only, did we decided to give whatever strange and comfortable yet wildly uncomfortable coupling thing we are trying to do a shot, but I also somehow decided it was a good idea to jump head-first into my last relationship at the same time, creating a strange poly-dynamic that can only be described as maybe not a good idea. But somehow, somehow, it’s kind of working? I say that with a rampant dose of skepticism as I sat in my living room last month with both of them wondering why on earth I had ever thought it was remotely a good idea to put them in the same place at the same time. And somehow we all survived that weekend, maybe a little wiser, a little better at identifying what we needed. And a little more confused. As you can see I’m clearly doing a great job at figuring this all out. The truth is it wasn’t supposed to all collide that way, and it was just supposed to be a visit from my previous partner while the other was out of town. But plans change, and there we all were. Stuck in the house together. Tolerating it. Now in my model of the world, more love is always good, more love is more love, and who doesn’t want that? But I’m a delusional optimist, which normally I gotta say works in my favor. And A lot of the constructs we have created around monogamy and relationship structures actually do us more harm than they do good sometimes. And one of the ways that they can be particularly harmful is that there’s this big thing, and it’s called cheating. And cheating is like this extraordinary betrayal of trust and love and safety, and yet it happens at some point in most relationships. Whether it’s an emotional affair, or a physical one. And the one thing that is helpful about polyamory is that it takes the shame, the fear, and the deceit theoretically out of the picture. It allows us to examine jealousy, connection, patterns, attraction, safety, and security through a lens that doesn’t center around fidelity, but actually centers around needs, and feelings being heard and met. The thing I am more concerned about creating for my partner is not possession, it is safety. I want them to know that I am rooting for them, that I want them to be appreciated, loved, cared for. Not only by me but by others too. But I’ve essentially thrown these two people who have never been in a polygamous relationship into one with me, and I’m holding a lot. It’s a lot. Can I do it? Yes. Am I a little exhausted? Yes. Do I think it will get easier, probably not? Although I would like to place attention and president on creating more ease. More clarity around everything. I’m doing my best. And lately, it’s felt like I’m failing a little. Mostly because I feel tense, really tense. It feels like there is a slow simmer of tension all around me. And I keep waiting for everything to click and bottom out, or expand or something and it just seems to be getting tenser. Now, this brings me to an important point. This is a me-problem. This is something that I am dealing with, and In order to fix it, I have to find the flow of my own energy again. To get out of worry or attachment and let go, to surrender to what is, what I cannot change, and figure out exactly how to dance within the difficulty again. So, do I know how to do this? No. I’m only human after all. And something that’s been coming up for me lately is that yes. For the most part, I’ve got myself figured out, I operate from a rational place most of the time. And feel my emotions all the way, and generally, know where my solid ground is. But every once in a while something knocks me off my center. And I need a reboot, some time to recalibrate, and come up with a plan of action. And life’s been freaking crazy. Not only was I testing for the entirety of last week, on everything I had learned over the course of the last two years. I also am seeing two people. And taking clients. Why on earth did I think this would be fun? I am so stressed out. And I’m having a lot of trouble identifying what would help me get back to some semblance of solid ground. I thought when my testing was over and I had done the thing I would feel some cathartic dropout, everything would go back to being simple and peaceful and joyous and ease-filled again. But instead, I’m just navigating a lot of feelings, my own and other people’s, and I very much feel like it might be time to run away and join the circus. Although since wherever we go there we are, I have a feeling I’d fall in love with a carnie and the whole situation would present itself all over again, only in a slightly different shade of awkward. Because that’s just it, we are playing out karma here. We have ties to each other, and we are supposed to learn whatever it is we are learning. I am supposed to be learning how to take criticism with grace, how to hold space for difficult conversations, and how to find myself again and again through that. And really I just want to be sitting and breathing and eye gazing and meditating and sharing medicine with the people that want it. But our complicated little human hearts like to make that a lot more difficult than I want it to be. We have a tendency to make things harder for ourselves. Rather than just letting it go. This, this is a lesson I’ve been learning a lot lately. And not so gracefully I might add. My full-on panic attack last week, and my tear-filled mess of a self after graduation last weekend should speak volumes. This stuff is hard folks. It really is. Healing, growth, change are not linear and a lot of the time they aren’t pretty. Last weekend I sat, in my lover’s house in Maine, on the couch in the living room at 3 am and clicked on a video sent to me by my ex, the one I started this show about, and it was them playing guitar and singing “the night we met” by lord Huron, and it just about freaking wrecked me. And I couldn’t tell if it was because I missed them, or because I missed the simplicity, the ease of our lives together. Or because it was the song I played over and over again after we broke up the first time many many years ago. And there it was. There they were. Singing it to me because they thought I would like it. And I did. I loved it, because it wrecked me. My whole heart spilled out at my feet. SO Dramatic I KNOW, but that’s what it felt like. I will take feeling, I will take love and pain and discomfort any day if it means I learn more if it means I see more truth, if it means I discover more of me, or if you.

And I think that is it, it is about learning to sit with discomfort, not as a punishment, but as a lesson. As a teacher. I am nothing if not a student of difficulty. I have learned to sit with unknowing, with the vast expanse of space. And I can learn to sit with all of this. Because in that sitting with discomfort I am creating safety, in every difficult conversation I have with one of my partners I am creating safety, by listening, by sitting still, by holding myself steady (you know, as best I can) and I think that we have so much to learn, from jealousy, from fear, from longing, from confrontation, from criticism from our mistakes. We have so much. And I know, that I am going to make mistakes, that is a part of the process of learning and growth. I cannot escape that if I wish to become better. And mind you I didn’t and don’t think it was actually a song for me, god forbid I ever again believe or indulge in the idea that that person could want to be with me. But it still brought up a lot of feelings and that’s ok. But I am tired. So this week I took a day, and I went and I cleaned my mother’s house, and I sat back down in a place where there was nothing wrong, where everything for a moment in the universe was peaceful, simple, quiet. I sat by the fire, with willow next to me. I knit and watched a bad tv show. And I prayed, to have the compassion, the strength, the dignity and honor to keep showing up, to keep fighting for all the love, to keep walking. Remembering, always, that at any moment I could decide to deconstruct the life I had built, and go back to sitting and meditating in the same four walls I have for years. But would that serve me? Would that evolve me? Sometimes we come to a growth edge, where we are ready to give up and walk away, where everything seems harder than it is good for us. And often times those are exactly the moments that we break through. We discover something essential and useful about ourselves.

So on my recent many-hour drive out to Maine and back, I decided to listen to the first few episodes of my radio show. And I noticed a few interesting things, first I WAS SO CRINGE, I mean I AM SO CRINGE. But you know what’s new. Second, I used to be WAYYYY FUNNIER, jaded angry Olivia was a riot. Ohh well, I’ll make a better point of mocking my failings more often. It has been recently brought to my attention that sometimes talking to me is like talking to someone on MDMA all the time, I’m extremely excitable and constantly telling you more than you need to know about things. Multiple times, in several different ways. And it’s super annoying. But you know jokes on you because you are listing to an entire show of me talking, and explaining things, so good luck with that one. So my worst relationship was… just kidding moving on. To the music, wow it’s been a while since I’ve said that. Well, old habits die hard. *Olivia resists the urge to play old Habits die hard…”