Recovery

It’s been 24 hours, and we’re almost okay again.  I think that’s pretty good for us.

I spent the evening curled up on the couch, with my legs on K and my head in Sir’s lap.  We watched a movie.  K and J are going to spend the night again.  SB is pretty okay.  I’m… mostly okay.  Sir is having the hardest time because he’s blaming himself.  But J said (after hearing every last detail from every person’s perspective) that it was just an unavoidable thing.

This thing we do, this life we choose, it embeds certain inherent risks… physical risks, emotional risks, and… although we do all that we can do to mitigate our risks as we navigate this chosen life… it cannot be, ever, without risk.

Last night, we hit a risk.

And, nobody wound up in the emergency room, which is better than it could have been!

There is one policy change going to happen because of this experience… but it isn’t something we could have predicted before it happened, so I don’t see blame in that.  Sir, of course, still tries to take blame, but… I feel comfortable in saying he, at every point, made the best decision he could with the information he had at the time.

I did, too.

So did SB.

We just live with risk.

And something that is making me feel pretty good right now is… I’ve realized… that as bad as I can lose my shit… no matter how bad we have fallen apart, Sir has never… not EVER… even in the darkest despairing moments… said we shouldn’t be together, that our relationship is doomed, that we are, as people, inherently broken and incapable of living in relationship with each other…

Michael went there… every time… shit got hard.

And I didn’t realize until that pendulum WASN’T swinging over me every time things went South, just how… deeply… deeply… traumatic that constant threat was.

I go hard into depression and despair.  I probably always will, my brain is not wired to subtlety.

But no matter how bad we hit a wall, and how badly all of us are bleeding from it… none of us comes to the table in the morning saying, “Welp, this is proof that we’re just too broken to be together.”  Never.

We came to the table this morning and said, “We need to talk about what was happening and what each person was perceiving so we can try to sort out what happened.”

I didn’t go to bed wondering if Sir was going to end it all with me this morning… or with SB.  I didn’t wake up with that cold feeling in my belly that… there would be some… terrible pronouncement of my inherent unworth as a submissive this morning.

And that isn’t to say that we were all roses and therapy circle this morning.  Sub Brother was embarassed and frustrated.  I was frustrated and anxious and hurt.  Sir was frustrated and gnawing his own leg with guilt… but… even when we got heated, nobody talked about ending things…  Nobody said, “It’s because you’re bipolar…”  Nobody said, “I just can’t handle this… it’s too much burden on me to be with you…”  And nobody decided that this was a sign from God that we weren’t meant to be together.

And the longer I go through the really crazy ups and downs of just fucking living… the more I realize that… normal… isn’t… actually… all normalcy.  That… this… this is normal.  That normal is having fights and misunderstandings and mistakes and misteps.  Normal is miscommunication and choices that go bad and falling apart and putting things back together.  And normal is… knowing that all of this is normal and not running for the exit every time.

I’ve spent so much time in my life… so many relationships… with people who pathologized me.  Because I have the label, it was easy to make me the scapegoat for everything that was… simply… life.  Or that was, even, their own shit.

I feel that… some of my past relationships… it was easier for them to be with me because… it let them not admit their own problems.  It could all be pinned on me because I’m the one with a label.  I’m the mental patient.

And now, I’m realizing… My label only means that my constellation of typical behaviors fits in a particular box, instead of spilling all over the floor without a container like “normal” people’s issues.  But that… we ALL have issues.  That, issues, are… in fact… normal.  It’s the… too afraid to admit, confront, reflect, grow with one’s issues that is the really insurmountable illness.

And so much of my life I let my label make me believe that my illness was the barrier, when, in fact, I might be healthier than anyone who made me the “sick one” in our relationship.

That’s a weird feeling.

It’s also weird that K has become the grounded, responsible, voice of reason in our little posse.  He was always the wild one.  Jason remains the utmost in implacable, but K is becoming all… wise and respectable in his old age.

Annnnd… LITERALLY… just after I typed that, he jumped into the doorway, struck a pose, and belted out the chorus of Eye of the Tiger at the top of his lungs…

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