book-review – Heal Into Your Desires

Parts of Me: Elsa

I’ve been feeling stuck lately and having a hard time writing. When I reflect on my stuck feelings…I feel frozen, a sense of impending doom if I make some wrong decision, it’s hard to feel my body and when I do it’s mostly just uncomfortable, my mind wants to take over and SOLVE something but mostly doesn’t know where to begin.

I’ll call this experience of stuckness ‘Elsa’. I feel angry with her at the moment. Elsa is getting in the way of my writing, and I LOVE to write. She’s probably also impeding my ability to do other things that feel important and urgent. Why is Elsa dictating how I spend my time? I refuse to let her win.

But what if Elsa is trying to help in some way? What is Elsa’s core intentions? Most often the parts of me that inhibit action tend to be protective. I identify as both a freezer and a fawner when it comes to high stress situations. These responses are protective measures to keep me safe and stop me from escalating any danger that is happening in my vicinity.

Since the pandemic, my vicinity has felt like it expanded a lot further than the North American bubble that I generally, mentally lived in. Elsa came and went for company. When she went away, I furiously covered the walls of my apartment in paintings like my life depended on it despite not identifying as a mural artist, and I watched and waited as a global disease unfolded. There was a level of connectedness with the rest of the world that had begun through my privileged wanderlust and it was both challenged and solidified through the shutting down and reopening of borders. The mandate that had trapped me on the other side of an invisible wall from most of my family challenged the privilege of border crossing I had experienced the entirety of my life.

Elsa supported me through this experience. She turned my brain off when I became overwhelmed by the things I lost before I was mentally too far outside of my window of tolerance. She kept me company during the many, MANY hours of alone time I experienced during the lockdown since I was living alone at the time. She generally helped me pass the time and likely the tension of her departures helped generate the fire of action that comes forth through me in her absence.

What if Elsa is the precursor to action? As I get older, I realize that often the most challenging part of challenging feelings is the judgement I heap upon myself for having the challenging feels in the first place. An unkind way to respond to someone who is already struggling I know. And then Elsa comes to the rescue to shut it all down. She is the emergency switch that takes brain offline until I can find a little thread of compassion for myself.

On Hierarchy in Intimate Poly Relationships

We’re talking romantic here, though another piece on friendships would be interesting too. My brain already considered a sub-series of power dynamics about hierarchy before I opened the laptop. It’s important to keep in mind that I don’t believe that relationships can be non-hierarchal. I believe we can strive for equality, but if we ignore the ways in which equality can’t (or intentionally does not) exist then power doesn’t cease to exist.

I go through periods where I immerse myself in short videos of other people’s worlds around the world and so this is what I gathered from my online poly community. Hierarchy is in the way we negotiate finances and how it can impact how much money you spend on a date with another partner. Hierarchy is living together and having down time to chat about other partners, the hierarchy of having more knowledge of others. The hierarchy of knowing a partner longer than another partner. The hierarchy of marriage, having kiddos, sharing property.

None of these are set in stone. We’re a collection of identities that both provide and take away privileges and shift. Consider being a passing trans white man, you have gone from a white woman to what most people will assume is a white man. In some ways, this is an enormous privilege leap while still having been socialized as a woman and retaining that history as well as mental health struggles that can result both from having experienced significant dysmorphia about your body as well as very real fears of being the target of violence politically and in your immediate neighbourhood. Consider being a white cis man that marries this individual, now you are in a queer relationship. How does that impact the way in which you hold power? What situations might result in the experience of more or less power and how might that impact your behaviour?

Power is nuanced, invisible and morphing. There are ways in which it is obvious by a role you are in, think boss/employee or further CEO and entry level employee, and situations in which power might shift depending on the setting you are in despite your relationship to another person. Power is not inherently bad, though many make this conclusion. We are not trying to rid the world of power but more so wield it wisely. It is my desire that we take the time to recognize the ways in which we hold power and use it in ways that align with our values to lift one another up, instead of fearfully taking them down. What are some nuanced ways in which power shows up in your relationship(s)?

Photo by Abed Ismail on Unsplash