queer advice #103: woof
"How do I make space for me to have a lousy time when my partner is having an awesome time?"
Hi! I’m back with a new installment of queer advice. This evening’s question is from someone having a rough time, while their partner is in the midst of a trans glow-up.
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xoxo, Maddy
How do I make space for me to have a lousy time when my partner is having an awesome time?
In the last handful of years, I’ve experienced pretty significant personal upheavals, like, had a baby, immigrated (leaving behind a beautiful, embedded activist community, but also fleeing transphobic violence), switched to a new field where I work from home, fell in love (me & kid’s parent were polyamorous), left said kid’s parent, now live with new partner (for 1.5 years now) and their kid and my kid part time, which will be the holding pattern in this foreign country until kid is grown (kid is now 4). Woof.
During this time, I have known I need community, where I can live my values, see and be seen, and build resilience in the face of the global rightward march we find ourselves in. I thought I knew how to do that: show up to cool things with cool people, get involved in community projects, be friendly, keep following up, host gatherings. Sometimes, pre-pandemic, this plan involved white-knuckling through some social anxiety, but in general pushing myself to take those risks was well worth it. Well, no more. Increasingly in the last few years, when I push myself to go to gatherings, you know, where there are people, I have a pretty dramatic (to me, internal) meltdown. Maybe it’s the communication norms here that have me fail to gain traction in conversation here and then panic? An atrophied social muscle from being hard lockdown while pregnant during the pandemic? That forcing myself to do something isn’t actually a recipe for me to find easeful, genuine connections? With a meltdown comes the shame (a la what is wrong with me?) and very loud loneliness and hopelessness.
It took me months and lots of encouragement from my therapist and partner both sharing the effect of “HAVE YOU CONSIDERED GOING EASY ON YOURSELF” and “WHY DON’T YOU TRY NOT FORCING YOURSELF TO DO THINGS THAT MELT YOU DOWN IT IS CLEARLY NOT WORKING,” and I’ve *kinda* internalised it. I’m trying to be ok with not going to social things, to just make space to mourn, which is probably what I need, and trying (trying!) to trust that it’s temporary in the ‘if I feel my feelings I can actually digest them and move on’ sort of way. This is hard because I am scared that this urge is just my avoidance/isolation repackaging itself, and because it doesn’t address the sometimes urgent feelings of loneliness, as I have one (1) friend here other than my partner.
Now, as you can see in the question, my partner is in a different stage of things. She has recently found ‘her thing,’ and is making use of my breadwinning to become a community organizer-cum-local celebrity, like, launching a trans community space, volunteering with local politicians, networking and collaborating extensively with Cool Queers, all amidst a trans glow up where she’s getting positive attention and being seen for her gorgeous self, finally. It is beautiful to see! It’s amazing and the world needs her.
And it can make me feel worse- it’s just perfect fodder for my shame narratives. Like, ‘why can’t I be like that’? ‘Our’ friends are her friends. ‘Our’ projects are her projects- I do not know what I am passionate about or want to do with myself right now. And for the most part other than behind the scenes work like copywriting, I physically/emotionally can’t engage alongside her in her stuff due to the meltdowns and the attempts to let myself chill out. Which means staying home when she’s schmoozing at local festivals or doing cute activism, me trying to hold it together. Sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing. My brainspace in this scenario is worse when I’m doing solo kid coverage for her. To be clear, we do spend a ton of time together as well, it’s just those Things can’t be my Things right now and I can't (??) have my own things and it sucks.
I think we have a pretty good shared understanding of the situation and are threading the needle as well as we can. There are so many failure modes on how to deal with this degree of insecurity: I don’t want her to dampen her light or make herself smaller for me, I don’t want my envy and insecurity to turn controlling, I also don’t want to use an old default and just push her away entirely as a defence mechanism, and I know I need to keep communicating my feelings, let her hold me while I cry, and try to internalise her love for me and that she’s not abandoning me by having her own things. But none of this is fun or comfortable, and it’s unclear how to get better. So, I guess, what can I do from here? Thanks so much, Maddy!
The not-fun partner, 37
I’m not any kind of mental health professional, just a lesbian who has read 70 pages of The Body Keeps the Score, but if someone told me they were experiencing life-altering social anxiety and fear of abandonment, then said they had been through several major life unheavals in the past few years including a pandemic pregnancy and forced emigration due to transphobic violence, I would go ahead and assume they were carrying trauma in their body and nervous system. From the way you’re summarizing the mental health care you’re currently receiving, it sounds like you’re learning how to reframe negative thoughts and practice self-acceptance, which isn’t not important, but you might be better/additionally served by EMDR, Internal Family Systems, or somatic therapy that actually helps you process and move through what happened to you on a deeper level. Again, I’m not a mental health professional, but one way way I have come to conceptualize my own anxiety is that my nervous system’s default setting is “VIBRATE” and then my brain roots around for something concrete to pin the distress on e.g. the possibility that my house might start on fire after I leave (this is a really fun one! hahahhaa I love it). For years and years, the therapy I could afford was like, “Well Maddy, what if you focused on all the times you’ve returned home and your house was not burnt to the ground with your pets and loved ones inside??“ when what I really needed was strategies for getting my nervous system to calm down.