Dust, Bones, and Polyamory
The last time I remember feeling a sense of joy and meaning was during early 2020 in the eye of the storm, with the eerie calm of the pandemic offering respite from the grind of capitalism. I saw people come together, sing to one another from Italian balconies, share love and respect for frontline workers, and begin to form a political group consciousness around labour, universal basic income, and housing…And then it all fell apart. Conspiracies began to emerge about COVID-19, political polarization intensified, protests rightfully raged, and ruptures happened in every aspect of life, from work, to family, to friends, and naturally in our mental health.
So it began…
I’ve been exhausted. It’s not from a lack of sleep but from overthinking, boredom, and inactivity. Being sedentary during COVID feels a little like prison without the full measure to motivate you to do something about it. I was at my computer staring at the glowing white screen and rubbing my temples in a futile attempt to massage away a headache. I’d been too lazy to seek relief in pills but then it became overwhelming. I got up and lumbered to the kitchen for ibuprofen, that’s right, the off-brand, not the Advil—what am I rich? I found a sweetened Earl Grey I left in the fridge to wash it down with. A little taste of joy. I brought the tea back with me to sip on at the computer.
The browser was perpetually open on my email all day long in case any news came in. I’d check once in a while hoping for an email from MIT. I sent my book proposal to them months ago and finally heard back a week ago with a go-ahead to publish. There were a few more hurdles, I was told, but I’d hear back from them in the coming days. I’d been impatient and cautiously optimistic.
As I sat down, I glibly glanced at my screen. Then my heart began to race. I’d gotten a reply. I took one deep breath before I opened it, with a mixture of anxiety and excitement. I mean, they already showed interest, so it can’t be a no. Although there’s always that off chance. I started reading. It wasn’t a long message. My eyes went blurry staring into the pixels of the word regret. There was soft jazz playing in the background, but it only compounded the cacophony of noise in my brain. I looked over to my floating shelf at the little speaker and said, “Hey Google, shut up!” My eyes returned to my screen and refocused on the word regret, surrounded by the usual templative email that comes along with a rejection. In a few short sentences, I was offered apologies and best wishes. They decided to pass on the project. It wasn’t the timeframe or technicalities, it was the content of the original manuscript. It just wasn’t good enough, or in their words, it wasn’t what they were looking for. Now I was left there sitting at my desk, sipping my cold tea with a headache that would only subside to be replaced by another.
I took the news from MIT pretty badly and spiraled into a depressive episode. For a while, I was in what felt like the eye of the storm. A sort of eerie calm fueled by alcohol where I was safe, and even enjoying myself a little, but I knew it was gonna get a lot worse. I’d be drunk at midday with fuck all to do. Any prospect of work felt like filling time to get away from the feeling of worthlessness. I literally completed a PhD and had nothing to show for it. None of my shit was published and no one would hire me. Yeah, yeah, I’m supposed to be grateful for the education and privilege and blah, blah, blah. I felt nothing but resentment and self-pity.
I was living in a small apartment I could barely afford. My partner and I had broken up a few months ago. All this in the midst of the pandemic when I defended my doctoral dissertation over a Zoom call. It would be years before I would fully realize just how alienating this period of my life really was. As I transitioned from a student to what I guess must be an adult, I was utterly alone. My greatest achievement, marked by a milestone shift in consciousness, was an unceremonious event without support, family, friends, or my partner. Even in polyamory, the finality of a relationship leaves you hollow and alone. As luck would have it, the thriving sex-positive community I was immersed in pre-COVID, also splintered and fell apart in 2020 as political lines were drawn in the proverbial sand.
I didn’t end up getting any renewals on my teaching contracts, partly due to COVID and partly due to the precarious nature of academia. I was impoverished financially, emotionally, and relationally. I could hear the words of my ex-wife calling me a loser. I could hear my mom echo the same words comparing me to her loser brother. My love was gone, many of my friends were gone or divided, my academic career was in a rut, and my revolt toward the systems of power that infest every crevice of existence was manifestly impotent because I felt like an utter loser. I could not, and would not, win in the capitalist rat race, but I hadn’t worked toward any viable alternatives either.
A brittle bone shatters my illusion of specialness
Of all the shit things that happened last year, one was redeemed. My partner, Syn, and I got back together. Things were going good too, until I took a spill snowboarding and broke my collarbone. A superficial, insignificant, little bone snapped in two from a light fall that I didn’t even feel until I stood up and moved my shoulder. I drove myself one-handed for 2 hours to the hospital, only to be told to come back the next day, and ultimately underwent two surgeries to install a metal plaque inside me to commemorate the occasion (the first time the screws came out, hence the second surgery).
Immobilized on my left side. Sleeping poorly on my back. Slowly gaining weight and losing motivation. All while reeling from the malaise of 2020, which then inaugurated 2021 to become the worst year of my life. How did my clavicle play such a significant role in my downfall? It shattered my illusion of specialness, which Irving Yalom describes as an existential defense mechanism that helps us ward off our death anxiety. We are all prone to this irrational belief that we are special, unique, and inviolable. Terrible things happen to other people, but not me, because I’m special (says your unconsciousness trying to protect you from freaking out about death). And then when life pummels you with lemons, you lose your unconscious defenses and confront your mortality. So, I am not special, unique, or inviolable. I am a common, fragile, and mortal creature whose compounding feelings of failure, lack of stability, and vapid sense of meaninglessness about existence can be summoned with the snap of a shitty little bone. Call it the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Again, I was feeling pretty exhausted. Not so much from being overworked, I was used to that, and it was self-imposed. It was from overthinking and worrying about what’s to come, which to be honest wasn’t much at all. That’s the problem. There was really nothing to look forward to. I hate feeling down like this, but at least I was about to see Syn and take some comfort in their presence.
It was fucking cold outside. I had just pulled up to their house and texted that I arrived. I hoped I didn’t have to wait too long in the cold. My hands were freezing holding on to some grocery bags. They texted to say the door’s open, and I walked in clumsily, sighing and blundering through piles of shoes and an awkwardly placed bike in the corner of the entryway. I made my way in, removed my shoes, and walked upstairs into the kitchen where Syn was sitting comfortably in their lounger typing away on their laptop.
“Hey babe,” I said.
“Hey. Just give me a sec, I’m finishing up an email,” Syn replied.
I set down the groceries and pulled out the bottle of wine. I needed a drink after the week I’d been having. Without asking, I found the corkscrew and two glasses, popped the bottle, and poured. The wine got a little chilled on the car ride. I preferred it at room temperature because that’s how wine snobs like it. Something about the fullness of the flavour that I bought into while I was working bar in some upscale place that was trying to earn their Michelin stars. I handed Syn a glass, clinked it with mine, and took a long drink without waiting for them.
“Thanks. Ok, I’m done,” Syn said as they closed their laptop and directed their gaze at me, “How was your day?”
I went on about how tired I was feeling and the recent bout of hopelessness, or depression, I honestly couldn’t tell anymore. Meanwhile, my whole body began jittering from the gut outward. It was my nerves. My brain quickly processed the potential threats and locked onto Syn’s face, a forced smile predicated by a lackluster greeting, no hug, and a relatively austere presence. All the ingredients of a “cold.” That’s what they call it when they feel distant from me, cold. I’m going through a cold, they’d say. I could always tell too, and it often lined up with when I was feeling like shit. If I lost my confidence, ambition, or motivation, Syn lost interest in me. I hated it. It was a vicious cycle. I feel down, they feel distant, I feel their distance and fall into self-pity, they get even more turned off, and I ultimately feel worthless.
“How was your day?” I asked, trying to buy some time to process their micro-expressions.
Syn unenthusiastically but calmly related the minutia of their day. I heard them but I wasn’t listening. I was watching and tuning in for keywords—triggers. I polished my glass and poured another to calm the shakes. I could feel it coming. There was only one thing I really wanted to know and there was only one way to find out. I had to ask them. But if I asked, it would surely come to fruition. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, or I am an unfortunate master of reading other people’s emotional states. It’s likely a bit of both. I am hypersensitive to emotional cues from an anxious attachment style I developed as a kid and in my questioning Syn about my suspicions, it comes out as reassurance seeking, which it is, but then also becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It reveals my insecurity, which is what Syn doesn’t like about me. Maybe if I didn’t address those emotions they would pass, but then my anxiety doesn’t go away. So, I was caught in a catch-22. Either I asked if Syn was feeling distant and risked it being confirmed, or I didn’t mention it and became anxious. I was gonna feel like shit either way, so might as well ask. At least then I wouldn’t be in limbo.
“You seem a little distant today. Is everything ok?” I asked nervously.
Syn took a deep breath and their forced smile wavered. Their face fell flat like they were about to deliver bad news. I know the face and I’ve seen it a few times. It’s never good. My whole body was shaking, and my hands were cold. I put my wine glass down on the table and took a seat beside them on the lounger. Syn turned to me and prepared their delivery. Again, something I was used to. At this point, I was just trying to take deep breaths to regulate my body.
“It’s not just today. I haven’t felt close to you in a while. I thought I’d wait it out and see if it passes. Maybe it’s just one of my colds, but this time it just feels different,” they said.
“Why?” I asked.
“I don’t wanna hurt you.”
I’d heard this before. It was like they were holding back some nasty secret, and I couldn’t bring myself to ask them how they truly felt about me in those moments. So, I stopped asking why. And I didn’t try to remind them that their colds came and went and that there were hot periods too where the colds seemed like minor hiccups. I didn’t try to defend myself and tell them that I was worth more than this, that I deserved better, or that I was allowed to feel down without having to worry about them losing interest. This time I just felt resentment. Not so much toward them, as a resentment toward myself for going through all this again. It was the third time this had happened. The last time we broke up for two months and got back together while being “friends,” we started fucking again and falling back in love until we admitted we were dating. So, I left.
I got back in my cold-ass car, turned the engine on, and drove to get the heat going. My body was still, no longer shaking. I felt empty. There was a sense of relief mixed with the resentment I still harboured toward my own indignity. I drove home telling myself this was the last time but knowing that it wasn’t.
Negative visualization
After years of putting it off, I finally started therapy. Turns out, unsurprisingly, I have Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), which is a persistent state of worry, intolerance of uncertainty, irritability, and loads of tension in the neck and shoulders. It’s funny what a few sessions of CBT can do to take the edge off and learn some new strategies for managing anxiety. One of which, was negative visualization. I told my therapist about the breakups with Syn, that we were back together again (Yes, we got back together!), and our relationship was stronger than ever, but I worried about another one of their colds resulting in yet another breakup.
Negative visualization is a technique to confront my anxiety, especially when I’m triggered. I get to write down my current anxiety levels, then write out my worst fear about the situation I’m confronting, gauge how I’d handle it, and rerate my anxiety levels after the exercise. So, this is what the negative visualization looked like…
FADE IN:
INT: SYN’S APARTMENT - NIGHT
Syn and I are both anxious, sitting on the couch at a distance from each other, neglecting to look each other in the eyes, staying fixed on the TV but not really watching. I can sense the tension in them and how it reverberates into my own discomfort. I know if I ask, it will spark the beginning of the end. If I wait it out, it may pass but it's unlikely. It usually just gets ignored for a while and then comes out at some inopportune moment.
“How are you feeling?” Syn asks me.
“Anxious and weird,” I reply.
“Why are you feeling anxious?”
“I don’t know.” I’m lying. I do know. It’s because I can feel their emotional distance, and I know it’s going to be an issue.
“I’m not feeling great either,” they say.
“I can tell.”
“Why didn’t you say anything then?”
“Because I can feel you being distant.”
They sigh and turn to look at me. I’m still spaced out, not even looking at the TV anymore but at the walls, as though to ask them for help.
“Look I can’t do this anymore,” Syn blurts out.
“I knew it,” I reply bitterly.
“We just keep going around in circles. Things change for a while and then we’re back here again.”
“What do you want from me?”
“Please don’t make me say mean things. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Just say what you have to say. You’re always censoring yourself like you need to protect me.”
“Because you’re very sensitive and I know I can be a judgmental asshole sometimes.”
“Well, it doesn’t help to know you think very little of me but don’t want to say it because it might hurt my feelings.”
They pause for a moment, look at me, and begin in a slow clinical voice.
“I just wish you weren’t so weak all the time. You complain about all these problems in your life that you do nothing about to fix. It makes me think very little of you to hear you complain all the time like you’re incapable of helping yourself. It’s like you look to me to hold your hand or make you feel better, but you don’t want to hear that you have to do the work. Any time I offer constructive criticism you get defensive and wallow in self-pity. It’s really hard to be around that. I have my own problems and it really doesn’t help to have someone else around moping with me. I need someone to lift me up and inspire me and I feel like you just drag me down sometimes. You’ve got ten years on me and a PhD. If you don’t have motivation, ambition, and confidence, I really don’t know how to help you. I need to be around people who make me feel strong, not people who wallow in self-pity.”
I’m hearing everything swirling in my brain. The harsh words, the catharsis they must be experiencing at letting it all out, and the pain I feel at hearing what they think of me. I understand why they think this. They’ve struggled with depression, anxiety, coming out as queer and nonbinary, and being a POC. They don’t want some meek little person bringing them down. They want someone who is as confident as they are at being themselves in a world that doesn’t easily accept them. I also know that I feel how I feel, and I can’t help it. They’re saying I’m just not willing to do the work. Implicitly, they’re saying they’ve done it or are working on themselves in ways I refuse to. Part of that is true but I still feel a lot of resistance to hearing them criticize me. I could never take criticism well. It’s something I’ve been working on. It’s part of the many things I’ve done to work on myself. Yeah, I have ten years on them, and in those ten years, I’ve done a hell of a lot of hard work on myself to become a better person. We’ve had that talk too. Again, it doesn’t matter much to them because it changes nothing about now. They think I need to keep on working, that the work never ends. It’s fucking exhausting to hear, never mind to do. When do we get a break from all this self-work? When the fuck are we ever good enough? What’s the point in doing all this work if we are always incomplete? Imperfect!
“I’m allowed to feel down. When you say I’m weak it makes it seem like I’m never strong. Like I never have confidence. How am I supposed to feel confident when you don’t even acknowledge my strengths?” I ask.
“It’s not that I don’t acknowledge your strengths. It’s just that you have a tendency to complain a lot and don’t show any signs of being willing to do anything to change your circumstances. You generally don’t want to hear suggestions. I know you hate advice. So, it just feels like you want to use me as someone to complain to and then you look at me to make you feel better without wanting to change. It’s frustrating, exhausting, and a really big turn-off. I’m sorry, but I’m also allowed to feel how I feel.”
“I don’t think it’s fair for you to say I don’t want to do the work. I do and I have. I’ve done a lot of work on myself, but when I have periods of feeling down, I feel hopeless. It’s my process. I need to get all that shit out of me before I can start the work, and it really doesn’t help when you don’t even believe in me.”
“I’m sorry but I have my own work to focus on and I can’t be holding your hand. I think it’s best for you to do this work on your own. I can’t be part of it. It’s dragging us both down. You need to find your own motivation and not look to me as a crutch. It keeps me from doing the work I need to do on myself.”
“Your answer to someone who asks you for help is to abandon them?”
“You’re not asking for help. You’re asking for a blanket. I have offered you help before, and you didn’t want to hear it.”
“I’m asking you for help in the ways that I need help, not what you think is best for me.”
“I’m sorry but I cannot give you the kind of help you want.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“I won’t.”
FADE OUT.
Seeking new horizons in burnout territory
That therapy really did help. I got a better handle on my anxiety, learned to be more aware of my triggers, and got some breathing techniques for calming myself, especially when I’m irritable (but more on that later). Syn and I didn’t face another cold. So, the negative visualizations started confronting other worries. I never did ask Syn to confess those hurtful thoughts they had about me, because it didn’t matter. We are allowed our private worlds, and they really didn’t want to hurt me when I was down, so I didn’t need to push. In coming up with my own worst-case scenario, I realized their hurtful thoughts couldn’t possibly be as hard as I was on myself. Most importantly, there was no version of Syn that ever saw me as a completely worthless loser who refused to listen or change. That was my internal critic projected onto Syn as my worst fear. In fact, my ability to listen, reassess, and change was what they often said they most admired about me. And in between all those breakups, were years of love, honest and empathic communication, and growth. We actually got to such a good place that Syn asked me to move in with them. It was a beautiful 4 months of living together, parenting a cat, and warm summer days before I moved away for work for nearly a year. With my academic slump, I took a job where I could get it, and a small-town university some 5 hours away, was it. I’d be visiting Syn every other weekend, but in the meantime, I decided to get the most out of my work.
I got this tiny bachelor apartment in a complex that resembled an old downtrodden motel tucked on the right side of a rural highway. My move came with an Apollonian commitment for the duration of my tenure, which meant no alcohol, no TV, and no social media. This way there were no distractions or places to wallow, and I could focus on my work. Every morning began at 7 am with an espresso, an hour at the gym, a protein bar, and then a proper cup of coffee once I got to my office. A pie chart I printed out and pinned to the foamboard on my desk showed that out of a 24-hour day, I was spending 5 hours reading (some of this was after work) and 3 hours writing, with about 3 hours of teaching, and the rest on minutiae and sleep. I had decided to build 4 courses from the ground up, which meant curating texts, reading them, taking notes, creating lecture slides, and assessments (that I would also have to grade since I had no TAs). Meanwhile, I was in the process of writing two papers, and two grants, sitting on a committee, preparing for two interviews with other universities for the prospect of permanent employment, and reworking my book manuscript after a second major publisher reviewed it and expressed interest.
By the end of it, I had burned out several times, twice developed hives so bad that my right eye was swollen shut from the stress, and ended up not getting the jobs I had worked tirelessly to prepare for, not getting either grant, having my manuscript rejected a second time, and returning home to teach on a precarious contract basis again. All the work I had put in at the gym also went to shit when I got back home and started feeling low and stopped exercising. I rapidly regained all the weight I had worked so hard to lose for nearly a year and it made it tough to look at my body. I did publish a couple of papers, but it felt like, even when I gave it my best, I was still a failure.
Hello depression, goodbye motivation
It had been a whole summer since I’d been back home with Syn, but the sunny days just couldn’t make me feel any less worthless. Just before I moved back in, a new partner entered Syn’s life. Syn and their new partner, Wren, were spending a lot of time together and falling in love. Meanwhile, I had been going through a crisis of meaning, again. It’s what I call a malaise, or diet depression. Not quite the full caloried depression I had once experienced for about two months following a breakup, when I would go to bed crying and wishing I wouldn’t wake up. This malaise was punctuated by a stable baseline low mood, including a lack of volition, low self-worth, no hope for the future, and an overall negative worldview. My relationships all felt stale. Conversations with friends were challenging and dull, making it hard for me to remain attentive and interested, save a few glimmering moments of peace or joy. After waiting for over four months for my insurance benefits to kick in and have access to therapy, I underwent about five or six sessions with my therapist until I had a breakthrough, and finally, the dark clouds parted to reveal a little light. My interest in activities reignited, my worldview wasn’t as bleak, and my future seemed promising again. In the midst of it all, my relationship had been taking a toll. Intimacy felt like a chore, and I found myself feeling little motivation to bond with Syn. Their other relationship was taking off with romance and euphoria, while ours was stagnating and paled in comparison. It is hard not to compare when one relationship offers positive reinforcement, while the other feels like work, navigating negative emotions, and holding the weight of your partner’s (my) negative feelings and associated behaviours.
Syn said they were unhappy. I’d heard this before. In the past, my relationships ended when I was told my partner was unhappy, they no longer loved me in a romantic way, but still wanted to be friends (Syn knew this, and we’d been through it before too). Neuroscience supports the notion that a transitional point exists around the 5-year mark of a relationship, marked by a crisis or entering a companionship and commitment stage. Things at this point get calm and comfortable, which can be interpreted as stale or boring. Moreover, when you have consistent positive reinforcement and pleasure in your other relationship, the struggling and old relationship can begin to feel like a burden. Couple this with the malaise I’d been governed by, and you have a recipe for unhappiness. Personally, I don’t care about happiness. I care about stability, commitment, and trust. I don’t expect my partners to make me happy. But I do understand what people mean when they say that they are unhappy in a relationship. They often mean their needs are not being met, or they are experiencing consistent negative feelings. Relationships change, behaviours change, and feelings change. We can govern them or be governed by them. I was governed by my malaise and indulged in learned helplessness. I didn’t fight because I felt I had no fight left in me. The catalyst for a fighting chance is motivation. When Syn said they were unhappy, I found the motivation. But it may have been too late.
Hello adult ADHD, goodbye relationship
Syn and Wren had become deeply bonded in a way that Syn and I hadn’t. Their relationship took a more traditional trajectory, incubating together, meeting each other’s families, going to weddings, a trip to Europe, sharing clothes and smokes and secrets. Our relationship had been more parallel and independent. Syn never met my parents, and I wouldn’t want to put them through that. We built our relationship slowly, took time to find stability and trust, and experienced immense growth in ourselves and in understanding our polyamorous needs. Wren came in and got to fast track by avoiding all the bumps. They got to profit from the work we’d done, and so their relationship with Syn was heavily accelerated. Syn’s friends warned them about going too fast. I wasn’t worried because I wanted them to be happy. They’d had a rough go with previous partners trying to navigate feelings and intimacy and this time things were going well, and I was feeling compersion. I genuinely found joy in their joy and was over the moon for having a great metamour in Wren. Eventually, the three of us got along so well that we even started playing together. Wren and I didn’t develop romantic feelings for one another, but we did love each other and had fun playing together with Syn. We were even talking about the three of us finding a new place and living together. But like all good things…let’s put a pin in this for now.
Back when I first started therapy and was told I had GAD, I had asked my therapist if they thought I might have ADHD. Eventually, after going through my doctor and being put on a waitlist, I was diagnosed by a psychiatrist with adult ADHD. Turns out I met 13 of the 18 diagnostic criteria. FYI, you only need to meet 5, so I have enough ADHD for almost three people. In some ways, things finally made sense. Why I had been fucking weird all my life. Why I had a hard time making friends and got bullied a lot as a kid while being moved around from school to school. Why I only seemed to get along with the other weird kids. Why I was so sensitive to critique and rejection because I had been conditioned to it by my peers, teachers, and adults. Why I could never sit still for more than five minutes. Why I had a hard time keeping eye contact during conversations. Why I had a hard time waiting my turn, interrupted people, and talked a lot. Why I constantly sought dopamine hits in my environment, like overeating and binging on not just food but also entertainment and anything else remotely pleasurable. Why social media, alcohol, and TV were things I treated as all or nothing to try to help myself stay focused on my priorities. Why I had anger issues stemming from constant irritability paired with emotional dysregulation. Why I had also developed anxiety and depression, which tends to happen to people with untreated ADHD. And also, why I could hyperfocus on things I enjoyed and blaze through those tasks faster than my peers. When I told my doctor that I thought I had ADHD and wanted to get a diagnosis, his first question was how in the hell I got a Ph.D. I said, “I don’t know man, hyperfocus?” I bulldozed through my undergrad in two years and got straight As because I fell in love with knowledge, and when I had found something I was good at, I kept going, into grad school, and then out into no-man’s-land. Maybe it’s another reason I grieved the unceremonious transition from student to whatever this is. Maybe it’s another reason I became acquainted with depression when the most important thing I had poured meaning into, turned out to be meaningless. Not only did I not get the gold standard of a tenure-track position following graduation, not even a postdoc, but I slowly became disillusioned with the neoliberal machinations in academia. My philosophical heroes were the countercultural nonconformists, the misfits, and the rebels, who called academics pathetic dust breathers, and here I was at their dusty step begging them to let me in. I fucked myself into a catch-22 of meaninglessness by studying the critical philosophies that made me realize the banality of academia. I told you I was weird.
So, while riddled with mental health problems and trying out different prescription stimulants to quiet the internal chaos, I was also slipping into external chaos. Syn and Wren were in love, talking about marriage and living together in Europe, and I was slowly feeling that I was being replaced. Our joyous trio and play sessions went from fun and exciting to realizing just how much I was feeling left out. Watching my partner of 5 years fall deeply in love with someone else, have gratifying sex, and wanting to also build a life with them, was a source of joy for me, especially because I too had come to love Wren as a human. But when Syn would constantly choose to spend time with Wren or cuddle them all night while the three of us were sleeping in the same bed, or I’d see them kissing and wonder why Syn hadn’t kissed me that day, I began to think of that lonely little weird kid who was left out and rejected, who knew all along that something was wrong but not quite what. And in that frame of mind, it all made sense. If I felt worthless, why would Syn feel any different about me?
Despite having treated my depression and putting in some effort in my relationship with Syn, I don’t think they had overcome feeling unhappy. Wren had become a buffer to our relationship so some of the love, sex, and excitement could feed us all, but it only distracted Syn and I from the work we still had to do. We had only begun couples therapy when our long-planned trip to Costa Rica was coming up for Syn’s birthday. During the same period when we all thought we should move in together, Wren, Syn, and I had also planned this Costa Rica trip, which now seemed to be yet another distraction from the work that Syn and I had just begun to take seriously. So off to paradise we went.
Death in Venice and a new life for a lonely child
It was our second day in Costa Rica. The previous night we celebrated Syn’s birthday and partied a bit. Around 11 am Wren got a call from Italy. I was in the bathroom and all I heard was the word no repeated three times. The first one was soft with a measure of disbelief. The second was louder and choked. The last one was agonizing and turned into a wail. When I got out, Syn was at their bedside, but Wren was writhing on the floor. I knew it could only be about their father or their best friend. Their father had a recent cancer scare and their best friend had been going through severe depression. Turned out, that Wren’s best friend, Kai, had died.
I had never seen Wren in such pain, but they moved so elegantly through the grief, with wisdom and familiarity. They’d grown up poor and were not unaccustomed to untimely death, which makes some people hard in unbearable and unpleasant ways. Wren managed to weave softness and vulnerability with humour and heart. They showed consideration for others, asked for time alone when they needed it, and then returned to get drunk with us and tell stories about Kai, never shying away from tears or laughter. We had eight days ahead of us filled with chain-smoking, heavy drinking, and holding one another. Every day we drank in excess and somehow didn’t get drunk in the way you do when you lose your senses. We kept up lucid conversations about feelings, meanings, and mortality without ever getting sloppy. And in between it all, Syn and Wren had to plan all the logistics for the funeral and for flying out to Venice two days after coming home from Costa Rica with an open-ended return, so they’d have time to spend with Kai’s family and friends and clean out their apartment.
Two nights before our flight home, the three of us were in our hotel room getting drunk. Syn and Wren had also taken some weed gummies from a place they found in town. They were told it’s delta-8, so not as strong as regular THC (which is technically delta-9), hence why they could legally sell it. In any case, they ate these 50 mg gummies and by the time they kicked in, we had begun to play. It had been a while since sexual intimacy had even crossed any of our minds, but it was feeling right, and more than anything Wren was feeling ready and had initiated. We had a role play in mind to work with our situation. I was playing a therapist sitting on a chair beside the bed where Syn and Wren sat, playing my bereaved clients looking to use physical intimacy for healing. I even put on some suitable clothes and took out my journal to take notes as I encouraged them to explore their bodies. As they began to play, I wrote:
San Jose in the full moon of a late February night, I watch drunkenly as a scene unfolds between them. Syn and Wren, crying, high, a little drunk, like me, find passion in an aura of grief. It begins with kisses and spanking. Wren receives, while Syn checks in. I sit patiently awaiting uncertainty. I light up another smoke, fully clothed by an open window, while they half-nakedly engage in a sadomasochistic affair. Syn searches for an implement to strike Wren, and a litany of kitchen utensils appear on the bed. They move to the ensuite bathroom where a scene unfolds. I hear liquids and gasps. The final scenes of The Talented Mr. Ripley are paused on the television as I languidly puff on the cigarette. They return to the bed and the kitchen utensils begin to be applied. Wren is using my foot for support as they receive repeated strikes with a spatula.
That’s where my notes end. Syn and Wren had stopped because they were feeling too high and decided on a smoke break. We were all leaning out of the second-story window smoking and Syn made a comment about Wren’s hands. Wren looked down at their hands, “I always think of Kai’s hands. We talked about how we’d get old together and hold hands on a porch telling stories about our lives, and I’d picture how their hands would look as they got old. Now I’ll never hold those hands again.” They had cried before, soft, hard, sobbing, but this time as they stood there in the window and spoke about Kai’s hands, they broke down in an anguished wail that buckled their legs. I caught Wren from behind with my right arm against their chest and pressed them to my body, holding them as they cried. Syn watched with awe as tears rolled over their cheeks.
We finished our smokes and then all sat on the bed holding each other for a while. I said I needed a shower and got up while the two of them remained cuddling. From the ensuite bathroom shower, I could see through the glass that they had begun playing again. When I was done, I dried off and came back to bed in my towel. The two of them slowed down but seemed a little awkward, like they didn’t know what to do with me. I looked at them and asked, “Would you guys prefer to play alone?” They both said yes without hesitating. I quickly grabbed some underwear and went to sleep in the other room. Surprisingly, it didn’t take long to fall asleep despite my intense feelings of rejection, jealousy, and self-pity, but at 5 am I woke up suddenly in a fit of anger and anxiety that prevented me from falling back asleep. I tossed and turned until 8 or 9 and then got up.
The morning was awkward. Syn and Wren could tell I was upset. They were both a little tired from also not getting much sleep and still high from the gummies. Apparently, they were much stronger than advertised and got them both higher than they’d ever been before. We all decided to go out and grab coffee, then find a place in the park to talk about what had happened last night. Syn asked if I wanted to talk alone, but I wanted Wren there. We sat on a park bench sipping our coffees and I calmly told them both how I had felt unwanted last night and how this was particularly hard given the lack of intimacy between Syn and I recently, while their relationship was still in the honeymoon phase. Wren was already familiar with the relational issues between Syn and me, but this was the first time the three of us were all talking about it together. Wren mostly listened. Syn and I took turns talking about how we were feeling, which was mainly reiterating what we had already discussed at home and in therapy. Syn still had uncertainties about their feelings toward me. They still loved me but there was an absence of romantic and sexual feelings, which explained why last night was hard. Wren asked me what I wanted to do.
“It’s not up to me. I’ve already made my decision. I love Syn and I want to fight for this relationship. It’s up to them to decide what they wanna do,” I said.
“Our relationship isn’t working, and I want it to change. I have to be honest. I find myself feeling resistant to work on it,” Syn responded.
“What I’ve learned is that all relationships get to this point where things feel more like a solid friendship and then the romance ebbs and flows. That’s when you have to work together to reignite the romance and intimacy. Syn, you’re going to get to this point again, with Wren, or someone else, and you’ll have to make this same decision again. To fight for the relationship or let it go. I hope you do find someone worth fighting for because otherwise, you’ll jump from relationship to relationship chasing the high and missing the opportunity to build a life with any of those people. I’ve been there before, and it just sucks to lose someone you’ve spent so many years with because you’re scared that those romantic feelings won’t come back. I’m ready to fight for that and what hurts me right now is feeling like I’m not worth fighting for.”
We talked some more about what changes Syn wanted in our relationship and it ultimately came down to me moving out, Wren moving in, there being no expectations for sex in our relationship for the time being, and seeing how things feel after. I asked if that meant we would continue to be partners or if it meant we would transition to being friends.
“I’m really sorry because I know how much I’m hurting you, but I don’t know what this means right now and what our relationship will look like when I get back from Venice. I am overwhelmed with everything that’s happening and I’m going to need this time to process. What I know is that I love you very deeply and I can’t imagine you not being in my life. You’re my best friend and I’m really scared that if those romantic feelings don’t return, you won’t want to be in my life,” Syn said.
“I don’t want to give you an ultimatum. You know that my anxiety is defined by an intolerance of uncertainty and in the past, I would have forced an ultimatum to feel a sense of control over the situation and over my emotions. But I’m at a place in my life now where I want to live up to my ideals, and I want to handle this with grace. I need to do this for myself. I don’t want to live like that anymore. Governed by anxiety. So, I’ll sit with the uncertainty, and we can deal with our relationship when you get back from Italy. But no matter what happens, I’ll still be in your life.”
“Thank you. I really appreciate that,” Syn said.
Death has a funny way of putting life into perspective. All the bullshit washes away and you can see what’s really important. I didn’t know Kai, but I got to know what they meant to Wren and be there for them in their grief. I got to see vulnerability and strength in Wren and Syn as they held each other in both agony and pleasure. Seeing Wren go through this and not have Kai in their life anymore made me appreciate the fact that no matter what happens, I am not losing Syn. I may no longer live with them, and we may end up not being in a romantic relationship anymore, but they are still alive, they still love me, and still want me in their life. I realized that they are important to me, and I also want them in my life, even if things have to change and even though it hurts.
When we got back to the hotel room, Syn and I took some time to lie on the bed together and talk. Wren went out for a while to give us some space. We lay on our backs staring at the ceiling. Syn had their hand on my chest caressing me.
“How are you feeling?” they asked.
“I feel gutted.”
“What do you need right now?”
I responded automatically, “I don’t know.” This was generally my go-to response when I was hurting. But this time I also heard a little voice inside me say, I just want to be held and told that everything will be alright. It made me feel guilty, vulnerable, and ashamed, but I kept hearing it, repeating until I mustered up the courage to say it out loud. I asked Syn to hold me. They took me in their arms, and I began to sob, hard. They kept holding me like this for some time while I cried, until I finally said, “I have never asked you to hold me while I cried before.”
“I know baby,” Syn said.
“I’ve never asked anyone. It was hard for me to ask but I kept hearing this little voice inside me asking to be held and told everything will be alright.”
“Everything will be alright my love,” Syn said as they too began to cry while continuing to hold me in their arms and stroking my head.
As we held each other, I felt the lonely child inside me weeping with relief. I hadn’t realized how much I needed that my whole life. As a child, when my mother would punish me, if I began to cry, she would shout at me to stop or threaten me that if I kept crying, she would hit me, in the vein of—I’ll give you something to cry about! I wasn’t allowed to cry. Whenever I did, I was scolded, threatened, or told to stop, even if it was with gentleness, as though it was inappropriate. My father’s version of this was to remind me that others have it worse, and people have faced worse things, therefore I needed to be strong, in the vein of—Suck it up! I have always had a hard time crying in front of others, though I was often very emotional. The feelings I got were shame and embarrassment, so I could only show a few tears, but then actively stop myself from sobbing. It’s fucked. Children should not be told that they are not allowed to cry!
When Syn and I got out of bed, I felt light in my body. The weight I had carried for so long was now gone. I felt good. Happy even. More importantly, I had experienced another breakthrough.
Will I too work after I’m dead?
After we got back home from Costa Rica, we had two chaotic days to get Syn and Wren unpacked, see family, and repack for Venice. They’d be gone for a month, and I’d be left in limbo. It wasn’t too bad because I had two big interviews coming up at major universities for permanent full-time positions and being alone would help me stay focused. On the morning of their flight, I was home with Syn, while Wren was at their place. I had gotten ready to head to work and came into the kitchen to say farewell to Syn. They hopped out of a Zoom meeting, came to hug me, and told me they had something for me. They handed me a handwritten letter. I asked if I should read it now or save it for after they leave. They said it was up to me. So, I sat down at our kitchen table, opened the letter, and began to read it out loud. Syn was leaning against the counter listening. The letter began by reaffirming how much they love me and continued on to say that they’ve had some clarity since coming back home. I choked up as I read the next words, “Now, I am calm and grounded and ready to fight. I want to fight to keep loving you, to stay in your life for as long as you’ll have me.” I kept reading through my tears to the end where they thanked me for showing them how to persevere through the hard times and learn to love harder, but also softer.
I stood up. We both looked at each other with teary eyes and smiled. As we embraced each other, I felt loved and secure. I didn’t ask what this meant for our relationship. I knew I was still moving out, but that we were both committed to loving each other and being in each other’s lives, however that turned out. I just said thank you. We both said our I love yous and goodbyes before I ran off to work.
Later that week, I had my first big interview, which lasted nearly 12 hours, between meetings with department heads, and students, presentations, lunch, more meetings, one-on-one interviews, and dinner. By the end of it, I was fried, but I really needed a drink. So, I met up with Jeff, one of my academic buddies at our favourite watering hole to catch up. He hadn’t seen me in weeks and there was quite a bit to catch up on even before getting to my interview. I told him I was ambivalent about the position. If I got it, it meant I would be locked into academia, focusing on my teaching, research, and service to get those tenure-track promotions, which is a decade-long process, or more, and by the end of it, I’d be creatively and intellectually withered. I’d turn into another dust breather. But if I didn’t get the job, it meant I wasn’t even good enough to be a dust-breathing academic.
Jeff told me a story about something he had found in the news recently. A student at a nearby university was taking an online course and when he tried to find the professor’s email to thank him for the engaging online lectures, he found his obituary instead. The professor teaching the class had died 5 years ago and the university was still using his video lectures, calling them a teaching tool. “It’s funny,” Jeff said, “This man is still working even after he’s dead.” I laughed to tears, partly drunk, partly tired, and mostly because I needed a damned good laugh.
“This absurd capitalist nightmare haunts you even after death.,” I said.
“With generative AI we’ll all be working long after we’re dead,” Jeff replied.
“I don’t think this is what the Ancient Greeks had in mind when they wanted to achieve immortality through their legacy.”
The need for community
So, why am I writing this blog? Well, after four years of struggling through feelings of meaninglessness and alienation, I remembered something that had always been important to me. My writing. Recently, I felt the creeping claws of malaise gripping me yet again, and I decided to say no. I will not submit to this feeling. Nietzsche says that the strength of one’s will is measured by how much suffering one can endure and learn to take to one’s advantage. It’s something I used to embrace as my creative motivation to write and paint and make music. Ultimately, burying myself in my writing will not fully counteract the depth of meaninglessness that I dwell on regularly, but it will help put those thoughts somewhere, perhaps connect to others who feel the same way, and eventually build a sense of community.
I no longer believe the task of creating meaning is a solo project. In fact, that’s just how neoliberal individualization and responsibilization function to make you feel like you are a brand–a unique marketable entity in constant need of improvement via technologies of self-help, in competition with other branded entities–where all relationships become transactional toward satisfying business-like goals and any systemic inequities you face on your path to success are internalized as personal failures that you are solely responsible for fixing within yourself. We are living through a meaning and mental health crisis where we are becoming alienated from our communities, divided by in-group politics, and inhibited from realizing a collective political consciousness necessary for many, much needed, social changes.
This blog is a simple start, for me to do what I know brings me a sense of meaning by exercising my creativity and my demons. I am inspired by Mark Fisher and his blog, his cultural critiques, and philosophical position on capitalist realism and postcapitalist desire. To begin with, we need to shift our libidinal desires away from capitalist consumerism, not by denying our libido, but by reorienting it toward postcapitalist desires. If there is an alternative to capitalism, it’s certainly not in the past! A pre-capitalist utopia is a return-to fantasy marked by magical beliefs and nostalgic hallucinations. Time does not move backward, and we ignore the many problems, horrors, and inequities of the past when we idolize some archaic paradigm, we likely never lived in. If we are to be responsible for anything, it is creating our future. Embracing our existential freedom to make every decision going forward as though it’s a decision we would make again through all eternity, while accepting the responsibility of that decision.
This blog was a decision like that. Envisioning Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence and the weight of my eternal choice not to submit to my malaise, but to turn it to my advantage and write. But this is only one relatively small and independent decision that I will likely need to make again, and again, because I am only one person facing a resilient system that works efficiently to grind people down, and someday the overwhelming malaise might win. As brilliant as Mark Fisher was in critiquing and challenging capitalism as a system that places us in mental states that are analogous to depression, he left an unfinished project behind in his postcapitalist desire. Ultimately, his depression won, and he killed himself in 2017 while on a waitlist to see a therapist. He believed that we cannot overcome our collective mental health crisis if we continue to see ourselves as damaged individuals with private problems. We not only have a need to connect to each other, but to build communities, and collectively create meaning. So, this blog is a small step toward bigger dreams. It’s personal, but not private, and will slowly bring contributions from others, in the hopes of generating some shared meanings to combat our collective crises.
