moominmuppet

I mentioned in my last post that I can't abide feeling hobbled.

I like heels, because I like the height, but they have to be solid and strong, good for tromping about, roomy at the toes. Stilettos, not happening. Ballet shoes (the kink variety) give me the shivers. And my feet can't take even stompy heels for as long as I'd like anymore. I'm not ok with trading stride for height (although my relationship to height, in a family of men ranging from 6' 2" to 6' 5", is a whole other post. There's my true body dysphoria, not at my crotch. I am MUCH bigger inside my head).

Feeling my body move and work is a deep part of my sensual enjoyment of the world and my sexuality. My stride is at the core of that. It communicates and expresses me and my moods. I like to move quickly and confidently, I like the feel in my legs and hips and shoulders. I like the swing of my hips as much as I like the length of my steps.

That also breaks a lot, though. Sometimes for long periods; bouts of plantar fasciitis (I'm convinced Hans Christian Andersen experienced this; it explains so much about The Little Mermaid's "walking on knives"), or more common and variable joint pain throughout my legs. I am literally hobbled, my stride shorter, slower, more hesitant. My balance is off, I fall more easily. I can't send the same signals in the same ways, and sometimes it really shuts me down. Sometimes I'm in a weird middle state where I can still choose to move how I want, but it's gonna hurt. It gets... complicated.

One of the best things about having a intermittent illness, though, is the feeling when it goes away. When I come out of a flare and I can move the way I want to, it is one of the most glorious feelings on the planet. Walking down the hall at work is a celebration. I dance on the sidewalk (quite literally). I don't know that I could appreciately as deeply what my stride means to me if I hadn't lost it so frequently.

I do find it amusing to be a woman in comfortable shoes, though. ;P

Sitting on the porch, smoking and writing while Chad is out with a friend. Just had an amusing mental image, while thinking about the ways in which I'm cooperative until pushed.

Obviously, I'm a non-newtonian fluid. Cornstarch and water, that fabulous old science class demo. Fluid, except under pressure. That fits. ;P

I'll do almost anything but what you try to make me. I'll give almost anything except what you try to take from me.

It's about locus of control. It's why I'm becoming more and more certain that "dominant" is an important part of the ever-growing list of tags and annotated labels that help describe me.

My Grandmother was a sociopath. At least, that's the language I grew up with, not sure what the DSM would label her now. It'd probably be complicated. She was brilliant, she was a master manipulator, she was abusive. When she was young she was very beautiful, and she used her brains and her sexual power to get what she wanted. She almost got us kids taken away from my folks when she was living with us (seven years or so, I think, total), threats of claiming elder abuse if my parents tried to get her out of the house for being abusive toward us (my Mom, her daughter, had grown up largely in foster care, so this was a nightmare fear for her). My first realization of my mother's true humanity was her sobbing at the kitchen table when I was five or six because Grandma had disowned her (again). A large part of why I am so vocal about my appreciation of my mother's parenting is because I know her deep insecurities; no role model of good mothering of her own to follow. Grandma once bit me hard enough to leave individual teeth prints in my arm through a jean jacket and a sweater. I was terrified of her, growing up. We all were. She couldn't climb the stairs, so I'd get home from school and dash up as fast as I could. Once we finally did get her out of the house, it took a number of years for me to rebuild a relationship with her, learn how to have one with the boundaries I needed to stay safe from her, but that allowed for me to help care for her at the end of her life. From her, I learned how to keep myself safe with fundamentally dangerous people, and still have the most fulfilling relationships possible given the limitations.

She is also the family member I am most like, hands down.

It's a lot of why, by the end of her life, I was the one who could deal with her best, take the load off my Mom, who had been too deeply scarred to be that close to her without pain. I'm proud I could do that for my family, could find a way to build a relationship that challenging and keep myself healthy and safe within it. And she was a fascinating, amazing woman in many ways. I loved her, for all her flaws, and did find ways to get a great deal out of our relationship in the later years. It was our commonalities that allowed us to work around her psych issues. When I came out to her, her first response was to go find me the article about Candace Gingrich (Newt Gingrich's lesbian sister, for the young'uns). Letters from then on came sealed with rainbow stickers, or with "Love makes a family" pins, or clippings about what the quakers were doing on LGBT issues (she was a quaker). She supported every bit of my activism (she was the one with the FBI record from her history of activism), and I keep a tiny bit of her ashes in a necklace just for wearing to protest marches. She supported me being scandalous, and independent, and a general freak. We bonded over Janis Joplin and the blues. It was a complicated relationship, to say the very least.

When I say that I fear my potential to bully or manipulate people, folks usually laugh it off. They don't see it in me. I'm a progressive activist with all the "right" views about how the world could be, after all. How could that be a serious risk? How could I be _that_ afraid? She was too, though. And she was good at hiding her dysfunction; it's exactly why she was so incredible at manipulating people. I haven't really thought about it in a long time, but so much of who I am is a reaction to my experience with her. It took me years to tell my supportive and accepting parents about my cousins molesting me because Grandma had shredded our family into pieces in the previous generation (vanishing out of state, abandoning her kids until the neighbors noticed them home alone, famously chased my aunt around the table with a knife, disowned my uncle, the stories go on and on), and I was afraid of being the cause of another rift in this generation.

So I don't trust that good politics necessarily means good people. That's for the best, I think, because it isn't true. She was a peace activist, but our home was anything but peaceful with her in it. She did a lot of good in the world, and monumental damage within my family.

I inherited her body shape, the opposite of Mom's. I inherited at least some of her psych disorders (she was in and out of psych hospitals before I was born; we don't know her diagnosis, but it appears that bipolar with some schizophreniform and paranoid features is a likely call). I shared her politics and beliefs. I inherited her brains, and I say that not to brag, but because there is nothing scarier than someone who is dangerous _and smart_. I grew up knowing intelligence could be a powerful, powerful weapon. She was certainly an independent, headstrong, dominant, and scandalous woman, and I identified with that.

How could I not fear finding more of her in me?

When I say I am terrified of my potential to bully and manipulate, that I do everything in my power to defang the power differentials between me and those around me, that it took me 'til age 40 to begin to explore dominance sexually because it is so hard for me to feel safe enough, it's not because I'm a sheltered Pollyanna "nice girl". This is where it comes from. I'm generally light-hearted about it in conversation, "oh, yeah, how did it take so long..." but I know exactly why it did. I know I like being in control; I'm not blind. I know it thrills me, gives me a charge. It pretty obviously did for her too (not sexually; I have no idea about that; my family's famous openness about sexual discussion started with Mom, not Grandma).

When talking about psych stuff with people, especially other people who live in their heads like I do, I often point out that being smart is at least as much of a liability as an advantage in coping. I can make pretty damned convincing arguments to support just about any fucked up headspace my neurochemistry throws at me. I can intellectually intimidate my providers, I can baffle with bullshit. I can weaponize my power with words in subtle, sneaky ways. I can justify almost anything to myself and others with enough work. It's true I use a form of hyper-rationality to navigate my mood swings, but I have to be very careful and intentional about that, or my brain can lead me astray instead of pulling me to safety. A sharp mind can cut in many ways, and I've seen that too closely to ever completely trust my own.

It's gotten better over the years. I know the difference between crazy and dysfunctional, most of the time, and I try to live with the former and avoid the latter. My mother's radical openness about her own bipolar (much more severe than mine), itself a reaction to Grandma in many ways, is at the core of my deep, deep belief in the power of being out and honest even when it disconcerts people, even when it's scary as hell to do, vulnerable and exposing. That changed everything about my family, made this generation so different from the last, halted so many horrible patterns. My focus on navigating social dynamics in large part by making the subtextual power dynamics textual and addressable comes from a similar place, and I think has had similar positive effects.

So yes, 40 years in I've finally gotten to a point where I may be able to play with that fire, explore the fun and stimulating elements of intentional power exchange. I don't know that it can ever be anything but complicated for me, with my history and my fears, but I do think I'm at a point where "rewarding" finally outweighs "terrifying". I'm glad of that.

I'm about to do a bunch of toy reviews, so now seems like a good time to reshare this; I wrote it back in 2001 or so, I think? It doesn't include some of my earliest explorations, but it certainly explains a great deal about how central curiosity and exploration are in how I think about my sexuality.

Apologies for any formatting weirdness. Also, I'm posting it basically unread, since I'm all muzzy-headed at the moment. May go back and add some clarifications, corrections, and updates at some point, may not. Also, I suspect some of my age guesses about how old I was are over-estimates.

TINKERING
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This was triggered by a comment I made on my sexuality filter, but I think it's really relevant to how I interact with my social network overall, and deserves to be an open post as well. Additionally, I'm going to add to the bottom a good chunk (the less explicit bits) of how I navigate boundaries around sexuality-related communication.

The comment I made, in part:
...more fun to share with friends than strangers!
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Since I haven't talked about this one in a while, I figured I'd post some of my profile info from different sites as an example of how I describe myself, how it differs by context, and how it's overall very strongly similar (this has a lot to do with a strong commitment not to compartmentalize my life - again, another post topic for someday)

OKCupid Profile (the longest of any of my profiles out there, I'm pretty damned sure. Also the profile that has resulted in a number of awesome involvements in my life, especially Chad!):
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Fetlife (one of my briefest because I use it so rarely):
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My XTube Profile (cutting the bits that are copy/paste from my OKC profile, fyi):
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One of my random Craigslist ads from a few years ago (hate that CL makes me choose between posting in W4W or W4M):
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Hmmm. Wasn't I going to go back to sleep after the last post?

I've now got a custom filter going on over on my Facebook as well, so you're welcome to let me know if you'd like to be added there. I'm going to mostly try to keep the same posts in both locations, as much as possible.

Libido surge recently, so it's about to get all porny up in here.

So, before I tackle big long topics like trees and masturbation (no, really, that's a big long topic), I'm going to ease my brainmeats in and just rave about my new toy.
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The reasons I hid my relationships and sexual involvements over the years are hugely complicated, and have been one of the bigger mindfucks in my life. It's taken a long time to sort out the multitude of often conflicting reasons that was such a strong pattern, most especially in middle and high school.

Reason the first (starting with the simple stuff): Access. Mom and Dad always accepted me having both male and female friends. I love them for that, but it also gave me an odd conundrum: if I told them I was involved with a guy (because I wasn't yet aware I was queer and women were an option for me), odds were good we'd get watched a lot more closely than they ever did about my friendships with guys. What halfway sane and horny teenager wants to risk fucking up that bit of excellentness?

Reason the second: my own weird gender shit. "Dating" meant my guy friends might stop treating me as a friend and start treating me as a "girl". I was horrified by that idea. Most of my early grope and tickle was with close male friends, and very much as a rough-housing tomboy. I got to second base and dry-humping about three years before I got to kissing, largely as a result of that. (kissing would've "changed things" in ways that wrestling and riding each other on the bed wouldn't) It was partly about fear of losing my real friendships with these guys, especially Chris (the reason Appetite for Destruction is still a powerhouse libido album for me today). It was also partly about my own discomfort about being pushed into gender roles that never felt comfortable for me, and reactions that I didn't really understand until I encountered the concept of genderqueerness years later. One of the reasons Chad and I fit so well together is that he actively recognizes and appreciates both my masculinity and my femininity. I feel grokked deeply enough to feel free of all that shit in ways that's extremely rare for me with male-identified male-bodied people (genderqueer and female-identified people, regardless of their bits, don't trigger that defensiveness in me. Trans guys feel downright safe to me, because they're more likely to get it than almost anyone else).

Reason the third: My own weird poly shit. I consider myself deeply and inescapably poly. I was long before I had the conceptual framework or emotional maturity to understand that about myself. I have "officially" been contractually monogamous for a total of two weeks and one day in my life; a week with Jordan once, summer after graduation from high school (I freaked out, broke up with him, was so relieved and happy I lost my virginity the next night with him), a week or so with Scott when we dated at the beginning of freshman year in college (an awesome guy, and it mostly ended because it was freaking me out in weird ways I couldn't, at the time, understand), and one day with Mike when we were trying to resolve relationship issues and decided to give monogamy a try (he wasn't even back to Cleveland before I was calling, freaking the fuck out and declaring we needed a different solution or an end to things). That's it. There were times when I wasn't sure whether the situation implied I was "supposed" to be monogamous, and that stressed me the fuck out, but those were the only times I actually officially tried it. Not to say I haven't been de facto monogamous or celibate at plenty of times in my life, but that's worlds different inside my head from committing to it as a indefinite promise. Monogamy isn't just unnecessary for me, it's actively harmful to my psyche. I describe it often as "feeling like someone just built a white picket fence around my sexuality". First I shut off my sexual reactivity to the rest of the world, and then it shuts off to my partner. I start perceiving my own sexuality as a threat, a risk, a potential problem. So I shut it down. This way leads misery. I respect why monogamy suits many people much better than it could ever fit me, I don't equate monogamy with jealousy and possessiveness in any necessary way, and I have no real problem respecting the agreements that others have in their lives or avoiding crossing those boundaries. Now that I get it about myself, now that I have a conceptual framework that makes space for who I am, it's all fine and dandy, and pretty fucking full of joy. In high school and college? It fucking sucked. I'd want intimacy and commitment and connection and all those things beyond furtive FWB involvements, but I couldn't comprehend that it might be possible to "have a relationship" and also not feel the horrible way I always felt when I tried (because I just accepted as fact that if you were in a relationship that of _course_ it was going to be monogamous). So I mostly had FWB involvements, with heaping doses of "I don't know if we're acknowledging this publicly or not" piled on, and then dealt with a lot of pain when those didn't actually assuage my needs, and left me feeling hidden and uncertain about everything. I adore having friends with benefits. Now that I understand the difference, and know how to navigate multiple different sorts of relationships, they have a wonderful place in my life. Now that I'm not using them to replace what I also need emotionally in terms of romantic relationships, that is. Find the poly community in a way in which I was capable of recognizing it and imagining myself in that kind of dynamic, was a Hallelujah light-bulb moment in my life when I was about 20. Life changing. I'd encountered it online prior to that, but it was at a point when I was 16 that I sort of half believed it was just online fantasy, not something people actually and really did. Highly amusingly, this was AFTER my first threesome. I am queen of obliviousness.

Reason the fourth: The parish. Weaponized against my Dad, as I talked about in the other post. They were always looking over my shoulder, and I knew some had hostile intent in doing so. Made me paranoid as fuck. I could go to a silly Davison carnival with a friend (can't recall whether it was Brian or Steve), and have 23 goddamn people ask Mom about it at church on Sunday (we counted). Paranoia? My reality.

Reason the fifth: School bullies. Most of the bullying in my life was psychological; I've always been more capable of defending myself (and others) physically, and only had a few fights or situations where I felt physically unsafe. Thank you, big strong body. The psychological shit, though... Fearing that any expression of interest might be a setup for a prank to humiliate me. Being publicly mocked for my weight, my lack of social or fashion sense, my geekery. Believing because of that that no one would possibly _want_ to be publicly affiliated with me in that way, it could only humiliate them. The bully obsession with the sex life of the american teenage girlgeek, and the joy they had in cornering me and interrogating me about what was happening between me and anyone I was seen with. Alan, the first boy I ever loved, held hands with me once, awkwardly, at our local mall on the way to see Last Temptation of Christ. I was cornered the next day at school and harassed mercilessly for details. Whatever could have been between him and me when we were in high school basically died that day. I was terrified, humiliated, didn't want to expose my precious little connections with people out where they would get us treated like that.

The shit that lasted in my head, long after I'd put all the rest satisfyingly to bed, was Reason the fifth. Oh, I knew people could be sexually attracted to me. I had plenty of hot, hot evidence of that, in corners, surreptitiously, hidden, hidden, hidden. I don't even know how much was my idea to hide and how much any of theirs, but I wasn't capable at that point of believing they could possibly want it any other way, anyway. It took years to get over that. It wasn't helped by continuing that pattern with all the confusing and "maybe secret maybe not" hookups in college, either, especially with Mike, who seemed to loathe his attraction to me 90% of the time (the other 10% was when the chemistry would get too powerful and we'd fall into bed again, and then there's be another moral crisis and declaration from him that it could never happen again. Until the next time it did, usually with at least months between occurrences and all kinds of fucked up awkward-not-quite-friendship dynamics between us in the meantime. That's the first five years of our history, before we ever (quite shockingly) became a real couple for several years (my most serious relationship to date aside from Chad, one of the greatest loves of my life despite being 100% certain that the best thing we ever did for each other was to break up). Unsurprisingly, not being a "dirty little secret" in Mike's life was some of the earliest shit we had to sort out between us when we suddenly got actually and truly involved.

It's a lot of why I will never deny a partner, or my history with them. No one will ever be my dirty little secret. Ever. I don't mind if casual partners don't proclaim me to the world; I get the complexities involved in being publicly affiliated with my life, and it's one of the biggest distinctions between "casual sex" and "relationship" in my life. Again, something I could navigate healthily once I finally understood what I needed, and what I needed to fix in my life. And one of the reasons I've chosen "mostly single" over "bad relationship" time and time again in my life, without compunction.

It is, again, one of those huge things I've found with Chad. When we started developing feelings, we had a number of very serious talks at my instigation to make extraordinarily sure he understood what he was getting into by being publicly seriously involved with me. I am ridiculously open about taboo and generally private topics. It's hugely important to me to be so. It also means, though, that just dating me will "out" people in all sorts of ways. When I talk at length about how I really only connect on a primary partnership level with other queer folk? That says things about my partners. When I say I don't date guys that don't like assplay, and rhapsodize about the joys of pegging? That says things about my partners. My experiences being weaponized against my Dad have left me very leery of connections close and public enough to redound into negative effects in other people's lives. Even after years of intentionally keeping myself and my life as far from any new parishes as possible, I discovered that the moment Dad retired from life as a parish priest, there was a huge weight lifted from me, a sense of freedom that shocked me. I had no idea how much of that I was still carrying around, still worrying some parishioner might stumble on and use against Dad. It's been one of the great struggles in my life as a sexuality activist, how to balance my need to follow my passions with my fear of being used against someone else.


And I may still have more to say about all this, but right now, Katy awaits!

Chad's off volunteering today, and I haven't gone back to sleep since he left, although I probably should so that I've got some energy for our day later. The house is totally empty except me and the critters, which is a rare occurrence, and I don't think I'll sleep again until after I write a bit.

So much going on in my head. I'm going to be shaking words out of my fingers for a while here, I expect. Not sure how much any of it will make coherent sense. Not sure how much it'll make me feel vulnerable, or relieved, or what-have-you.

I've been thinking a lot about distance, time, and history. About how it brings stuff up in my head I thought long-dead, or at least deeply, deeply dormant. Also pondering how different some elements of my life would be if we'd had widespread internet and social networking back in my teens.

FYI, the icon above is deeply personally meaningful to me. It was made for me by my brother, jajy1979, and is a Google aerial shot of my childhood home in Holly, MI. Those dark spaces are all the little spring-fed ponds in "my" woods. It's one of the places in the world (like Kenyon and Roeper) that it's so important to me to show to Chad.

Actually, that's kind of relevant to all the other stuff swirling in my head about what connections I did and didn't maintain over the years. I loved Holly. Davison was only about an hour away from it, but as Mom and Dad have noted many times in the past, the move, when I was 11, hit me extraordinarily hard. I resented it quite literally the entire time I lived in Davison, missed going to Roeper, where I'd been lucky enough to attend for 4th and 5th grade, and never truly connected with Davison on an emotional level as my "home". It didn't help that Dad was coping with the nastiest church dynamics he'd faced; a parish in the middle of a charismatic/mainstream split, where backstabbing felt like it was everywhere (not my imagination, it truly was), and everyone had God on their side, or at least liked to claim so. There is nothing in my life that I've experienced more negatively than toxic church politics, and we walked into that at the same time I was hitting middle school; unarguably the most miserable and hostile social environment in school history for most people, including me. I was tagged immediately with this "priest's-kid-who-skipped-a-grade" identity; it was quite literally how I'd get introduced, all in one breath. Davison was a community where most folks have lived since elementary school, I was the new one, and that's the identity I got saddled with. In the church, I was used against my Dad as a weapon. Dad's ministry has always been about working with broken churches, but Holly had been "broken" in that it was dying, not splitting. While Dad built that parish back up over the years it was a struggle, but not a hostile and venomous one. I felt loved, accepted, supported, sure of my place in my community. It's where my basically small-scale socialist community-centered world-view come from. I was cared for _abundantly_ by everyone in my world. It was the only community I'd really known; we'd moved to Holly from Virginia when I was only three. In Davison I was just struggling to navigate teenagehood, and trying to figure out who I was becoming, and paranoid as fuck over the combination of parishioners and school bullies watching my every move (It's not paranoia if they're really out to get you). All those "positive religious experiences" I had back then? They didn't happen at Davison. I didn't feel safe in the youth group at all; instead I found my safety and connection through the Happenings movement, through EYE, through Gordonwood, the Episcopal summer camp I'd been attending since I was 3. It was part of my escape and safety from that toxic church, too, both socially and spiritually. I strongly suspect it was a huge part of why I was so deeply invested in my spirituality in general. Related to trying to figure out when I 'lost my voice' and developed that phobia about singing? I've put it together, and it makes a world of sense, both when it happened, how deep that fear has been, and how long-lasting. It happened in Davison. I remember still feeling safe and taking joy in singing at Happenings and EYE and Gordonwood, but it was different back "home" in Davison. My summer camp and youth retreat experiences were how I got through, the only times I really felt like I had true freedom to be me, to shake off the stereotypes my peers tossed at me, to feel confident and whole. Part of why I'm such a full-throated supporter of summer camp experiences is that it was sometimes the only way I learned who I had the potential to be, how confident, how happy, how able to make friends. Despite a number of wonderful friendships with particular people (one of the paradoxes in my attempts to understand my own past and emotional history is how I can look back and see so many powerful and deeply trustworthy friendships, and also such unbelievable stress and isolation and gut-churning fear), I never felt safe or at home in Davison, and when time for college came along, I ran, and I basically stayed run. My first priority was getting out of the state, getting someplace I wasn't constantly afraid that my wilder tendencies would be used to hurt my Dad and family. Mom and Dad tried to convince me not to worry about that, but I couldn't not. I couldn't grow into myself without getting out. I never came back. Sure, progressively less frequent weekend visits here and there, but even those tapered off even more once Mom and Dad moved to Flint, and then Alabama (!!). The longest I was ever back home was freshman year christmas break, for 9 days. No other visit ever lasted more than 3, and they generally only happened a few times a year. Kenyon became my home; I'd fallen in love, I'd found my new safe place where I could commence with growing the fuck up and figuring out who I was. I think a good part of my deep passion for Kenyon is the way in which it fed my soul in that regard, the way it rescued me, never more personified than in the Peeps. Going back to visit Davison made my stomach churn, no matter how I cared about and trusted individual people. Grandma was up there for a number of additional years, and I was her primary family contact; the only one who'd managed to rebuild a healthy and safe dynamic with her after her abusive past with us (a whole different and huge story that spans many years), but as it probably sounds from that sentence, this was still difficult stuff to navigate, took a lot of emotional energy, and didn't make it all that likely that I'd generally see folks, especially pre-social-networking, when it was so much easier to just fall out of touch. I sacrificed friendships with some truly wonderful people just to escape, to not have to interact with the world where I'd been so miserable, so insecure.

As a result, getting in touch again with various folks over the years has been truly wonderful, pretty stressful, and deeply head-fucking. Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes. (gratuitous Whitman, another deep touchstone for me, but one I've written about thoroughly in the past)

This post was originally titled "Asynchronous". It was going to be about how losing contact at that point, while everyone else's life went on, and most stayed in much closer contact over the years with each other, creates this weird wall. Being totally out of the loop on decades of shared history means it's hard to even know where to begin, what I don't understand, what I don't know. Making ignorance-based missteps is a shitty experience, and I have more hot-buttons about that than most people (that's a whole 'nother long post of its own). It also means when I see people my brain is likely to shock back right into the middle of the emotions I had about my teenage years, while they've grown up together much more, and I'm quite sure aren't at this point having big meaningful conversations about high school crap. For me, though, Davison history effectively stopped in 1991. I understand it sociologically, but it's still weird as fuck to cope with, brings up old emotions I thought long-dead, reminds me of elements of who I was that I'm so proud not to be today, makes me insecure in ways I don't even want to admit are _possible_ in my brain at this point.

And even aside from all the Davison-specific fuckery, there's always something vulnerable about getting back in touch with people that I'm emotionally invested in in some way. They're some of the only people capable of hurting or rejecting me in deep ways anymore. No one else in my life gets that power; everything about me is pretty much out and clear from the get-go. I don't get emotionally invested in people's opinions until I already know they can cope with who I am. I am fortunate to have an immediate family that accepts and loves me as I am, and almost no extended family to worry about. Seeing childhood chosen family (the Corlesses, the Diehls, the Bonsacks, Godfather Tony, Aunt Terri) has been deeply odd over the years for that reason. They're some of the only people I don't already know, incontrovertably, are fine and dandy with who I am today. And I already love them. And that's scary. (also, it's generally gone just fine; my experiences getting to know Godfather Tony as an adult have been the most spectacular and meaningful in that regard). It's also one of the only times I ever have internal debates about outness in the way that many queer folk experience much more regularly. Because I am so out about everything in my life, because it's so default and habitual, I don't have to waste much emotional energy on it. I haven't really had to much in years and years. Folks who know me as I am today will generally agree that I'm a pretty damned confident and powerful personality, comfortable with myself on a deep level, more unconcerned about coming out about things at the drop of a hat than many folks struggle with. Those are some of my greatest strengths, and it can suddenly feel like they've just vanished when I end up back in these few interactions with people from my deep past.

Other ways Davison fucked me up: hiding my sexuality, hiding my relationships. -- that's such a big huge thing, and also tied into why I'm having moments of body consciousness now the likes of which I haven't experienced in years. It also really needs its own post.

Jenn St. Onge was brave, and she was compassionate. More than anything, that's how I remember her.

I just found out last night, but we lost her a bit more than a year ago to a out-of-the-blue pulmonary embolism. Still trying to wrap my head around it, and spent my first break today getting through some of the tears that hit as it sank in, then cried some more during lunch while on the phone with my folks about it. Hard this way, being at a different grieving point than others (I found out from a friend who was unimaginably closer to her, but more than a year further along in coping with the loss). It happens he'll be back in Michigan soon, so I'm going to do a quick roadtrip up for some hangout time, partly to express my own support, partly to process it a bit more myself, partly just to show Chad and maybe Kidlet around my childhood home town. I expect the whole thing to be strange in a very emotionally multifaceted and intense sort of way.

But right now, I want to talk about Jenn. I came into the Davison school system in 8th grade. IIRC, Jenn didn't come in for another year or two, but it's more than 20 years ago, and I'm fuzzy on details. There are really only a few people I actually remember clearly from high school at all; she's one of a small double-handful who I recall intensely and with powerful affection. And did, even through those many years without Facebook or Classmates.com to refresh my memory. I only saw her again a time or two after we graduated high school, but she's always remained a powerful force in my memory. Appropriate, given what a powerful force she was in life.

I said the other day on Facebook:
Also, many of you had cameos in my conversation with Chad last night; long ramble through the history of my social dynamics from middle school, high school, first loves, initial sexual discoveries, and the like. Fond thoughts in your collective directions. Also to all who ever defended me when I was bullied, or was a friend when I really needed one - that was part of the conversation too. You've helped make me who I am, and I'm happy so something went very right with that along the way.

Jenn was one of the people specifically on my mind when I wrote the latter part of that, especially. When I got to Davison in 8th grade I had just skipped a grade, was dealing with a new school system, and was generally overwhelmed, immensely socially naive, and almost totally unable to psychologically defend myself. It was the social group that I generally short-hand as "the black leather crowd" who earned my undying gratitude by giving me shelter and protection and friends and backup. The Peeps are the folks who gave me that in early college when I needed it, these were the folks who gave me that in middle school and high school. When I'm talking about it, I'm most likely to directly reference Michelle (Mikki) H, since she, all 5'2" of her badass self, threw one of my primary tormentors up against a locker in 8th grade and successfully got him to back off for several years (by that point I was able to handle him myself, and did so thoroughly, and in a very emotionally satisfying way), but everyone in that group made a difference to me in various ways over the years. Jenn St. Onge, when she arrived, was just mind-blowingly intimidating to me because she seemed so sure of her self, so much further along in emotional maturity than I was, so cool and fearless and brave and utterly willing to give the finger to bullshit of all kinds. We weren't precisely close personal friends, but we were part of the same tight-knit social group (we shared a lunch table, and that's pretty much the definition of community in high school, isn't it?), and she may have been an intimidating as fuck badass, but she was also a kind, accepting, and empathetic one. She and I weren't all that close because I honestly wasn't at her maturity level at that point, but in high school she stood by me when I desperately needed it. It meant a lot. And her ability to project emotional power and confidence was just amazing and inspiring. I rather idolized her. I hope that every once in a while I manage to make someone else's life better like she made mine, just by being there and being a safe refuge from the malice of the world-at-large.