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genderjumperWhen I went out of state for college, I told myself and everyone else that I needed to be exposed to new settings when I had the most freedom to receive them. I loved my hometown (and even had ambitions of helping it with the demographic frisson looming on its horizon), but I intuitively knew that it would be better to leave while I could and come back later than to get stranded and resentful.
And that's what I did: three years in New York to get my degree, then three years in D.C. to hone my values and get a better idea of what's out there. Then I came home because I felt stifled. I knew how to test the boundaries in my home state, in my hometown, and to experiment into a newer version of myself, but I felt I couldn't do that in D.C. normativity. Maybe it was all the political aspirations in the air, maybe it was the way the conservative administration seemed to be looming over everyone's shoulders who applied for a grant, or maybe people from D.C. just really are like that, but I felt like an imposter. I had to leave before I blurted out every idiosyncrasy I noticed at the worst possible moment.
I missed my family and my friends, but it wasn't long before I was forsaking the familiar of Fort Worth and trekking to Denton and Dallas for all of my social time. My grandmother was entering end of life and in more pain than I could fathom, and listening to her wail every hour coaxed me out the door more than I probably realized at the time. My family were cheery about my return, but perplexed by the hows and whys when I didn't prioritize money or career. I couldn't tell you this for many years, but I was there for community.
Several times over, I thought I found it. A group of slightly older Denton polyamorists welcomed me as one of their own and almost immediately imploded (one core partnership literally ran to opposite corners of the earth). My flirty writing partnership cracked my entire world open, turned into love, turned into a phase of near-constant epiphanies and joy and connection, turned into an ambition of facilitating sex and relationship workshops, and then fizzled out at a glacial speed. Then came caregiving and it felt like stumbling onto arcane knowledge that you cannot unlearn; I thought those who understood would see past all political and intimate disagreements, but again I was proven wrong.
Those heartaches of 2017 -- losing my grandfather and two of the most important relationships I've ever known nearly in sync -- broke me. I stopped speaking to my fam-o for a while, just to see who I was without their negativity. I was convicted to start over, prioritize platonic ties, but that didn't hold for very long. Turns out I'm either really bad at platonic or just so good at sexual/romantic that it creates its own inescapable gravity well. Everyone so prioritized either developed into an unrequited love dynamic (in some direction or other) or moved away. And yes, some did both.
This was around the time that I first felt the itch to get out of here, though. Some of it was political, some of it exhaustion and disconnect, but mostly it was heartbreak. There were three major paths to get to my classes an hour away, and every single one passed within a quarter-mile of a home haunted by love that I could no longer express. I ached, I fret, I perseverated. Sometimes I took even longer paths home, just so as not to have to deal. How could this be my home when it was also theirs?
Then the perfection of my childhood sanctuary started to slip. My grandparents had left me their house from the time I was 4, and not once had they told me the first thing I'd need to know about how to take care of it. A yard was such a bother, and we never even use it. I now know that none of it was as bad as it seemed at the time, but I don't think anything has ever made me as anxious as knowing there might be rats in the attic, a leak in the roof, a foundation that needed checking, or trees that needed trimming before SOMETHING BAD happened. I had to get out of here and start over, someplace fresh, someplace where a crack in the paint could feel like an item added to the to-do list, not a betrayal of my entire childhood. If I won the lottery (which I also started doing, until it started to feel a little bit too important that I win), I would restore the house to its former glory but I'd still sell it and leave the state. Hell, if the Texas Republican party pulled a Sapolsky baboon fix, it still wouldn't fix the climate change or the heartbreak. I barely even recognized my hometown any more anyway. If I had to learn someplace anew, why not put some effort into it and plant roots somewhere by choice?
Political winds were blowing in an outward direction, too. When I was at peak burnout and going to grad school and the fascist first took office, the only role I could see for myself in the resistance was martyr: I had no energy, no emotion, only my breath left to give on the front line. When that didn't happen and I did recover some, I fantasized about a boring 9-5 job researching caregiving, nothing overtly political yet still deeply values-aligned. And I fantasized about it happening somewhere else. Anywhere else. I made no secret of it, and my Nesting Partner telling me that she'd go with me was the single most romantic thing that has ever happened to me.
I was vaguely aware by then that community had always been lacking -- that my family of origin had always been a little negligent, that the polya scene was always too distracted by sex and rules, that caregiving had never been apolitical and anyone who felt otherwise was feeding a system of exploitation, that when one's survival is deeply entwined with another's it's really hard to keep strict boundaries between platonic/romantic/professional relationships -- and I told myself I'd find it after the move.
Then came COVID. Watching the rise and fall of Public Health just when I was ready to get to work was only disheartening to the extent I had bothered to still have hopes about humanity. It was unpleasant, and unceasing, but not unexpected. I did get more clarity about what I'd always been missing, fighting for, running from -- and all it cost me was a stable society. With clarity, the meaningful ties started emerging without having to seek. An online friendship here. A shared conviction there. A classmate somewhere else. And of course a lot of practice in negotiating offline friendships to online and back. And I'm pretty good at that stuff. So wherever I go, I am relatively confident I'll be able to find and make community ties.
One more setback, though. For all those years, I took my body for granted. There would be a fix, a solution, an adjustment, any time my mindbody started to act in unfamiliar ways. I was really good at experimenting, and I had the freedom to tweak my life incessantly. But as my Long COVID really settles in, I have to confront just how unfamiliar my own body is now. And that is the home I dread losing the most. Like this move, it's abrupt and dragging all at the same time. If I knew where I would end up, I swear I'd make do, but every day I stumble over something I thought I understood and it just opens a floodgate of things I am not ready to accept. But why should I? They might be different tomorrow?
There was a time when feeling instability in my bodymind would just encourage me to lean harder into other ties, but at this point I'm over that sort of binary thinking. Although I don't think NP fully appreciates it, I'm trying to select a new place that would deepen my relationship with my bodymind rather than than reinforce existing bad habits. In particular, I want to go car-free, but I don't know if I can show my household what a joy that can be. Time will tell.
And that's what I did: three years in New York to get my degree, then three years in D.C. to hone my values and get a better idea of what's out there. Then I came home because I felt stifled. I knew how to test the boundaries in my home state, in my hometown, and to experiment into a newer version of myself, but I felt I couldn't do that in D.C. normativity. Maybe it was all the political aspirations in the air, maybe it was the way the conservative administration seemed to be looming over everyone's shoulders who applied for a grant, or maybe people from D.C. just really are like that, but I felt like an imposter. I had to leave before I blurted out every idiosyncrasy I noticed at the worst possible moment.
I missed my family and my friends, but it wasn't long before I was forsaking the familiar of Fort Worth and trekking to Denton and Dallas for all of my social time. My grandmother was entering end of life and in more pain than I could fathom, and listening to her wail every hour coaxed me out the door more than I probably realized at the time. My family were cheery about my return, but perplexed by the hows and whys when I didn't prioritize money or career. I couldn't tell you this for many years, but I was there for community.
Several times over, I thought I found it. A group of slightly older Denton polyamorists welcomed me as one of their own and almost immediately imploded (one core partnership literally ran to opposite corners of the earth). My flirty writing partnership cracked my entire world open, turned into love, turned into a phase of near-constant epiphanies and joy and connection, turned into an ambition of facilitating sex and relationship workshops, and then fizzled out at a glacial speed. Then came caregiving and it felt like stumbling onto arcane knowledge that you cannot unlearn; I thought those who understood would see past all political and intimate disagreements, but again I was proven wrong.
Those heartaches of 2017 -- losing my grandfather and two of the most important relationships I've ever known nearly in sync -- broke me. I stopped speaking to my fam-o for a while, just to see who I was without their negativity. I was convicted to start over, prioritize platonic ties, but that didn't hold for very long. Turns out I'm either really bad at platonic or just so good at sexual/romantic that it creates its own inescapable gravity well. Everyone so prioritized either developed into an unrequited love dynamic (in some direction or other) or moved away. And yes, some did both.
This was around the time that I first felt the itch to get out of here, though. Some of it was political, some of it exhaustion and disconnect, but mostly it was heartbreak. There were three major paths to get to my classes an hour away, and every single one passed within a quarter-mile of a home haunted by love that I could no longer express. I ached, I fret, I perseverated. Sometimes I took even longer paths home, just so as not to have to deal. How could this be my home when it was also theirs?
Then the perfection of my childhood sanctuary started to slip. My grandparents had left me their house from the time I was 4, and not once had they told me the first thing I'd need to know about how to take care of it. A yard was such a bother, and we never even use it. I now know that none of it was as bad as it seemed at the time, but I don't think anything has ever made me as anxious as knowing there might be rats in the attic, a leak in the roof, a foundation that needed checking, or trees that needed trimming before SOMETHING BAD happened. I had to get out of here and start over, someplace fresh, someplace where a crack in the paint could feel like an item added to the to-do list, not a betrayal of my entire childhood. If I won the lottery (which I also started doing, until it started to feel a little bit too important that I win), I would restore the house to its former glory but I'd still sell it and leave the state. Hell, if the Texas Republican party pulled a Sapolsky baboon fix, it still wouldn't fix the climate change or the heartbreak. I barely even recognized my hometown any more anyway. If I had to learn someplace anew, why not put some effort into it and plant roots somewhere by choice?
Political winds were blowing in an outward direction, too. When I was at peak burnout and going to grad school and the fascist first took office, the only role I could see for myself in the resistance was martyr: I had no energy, no emotion, only my breath left to give on the front line. When that didn't happen and I did recover some, I fantasized about a boring 9-5 job researching caregiving, nothing overtly political yet still deeply values-aligned. And I fantasized about it happening somewhere else. Anywhere else. I made no secret of it, and my Nesting Partner telling me that she'd go with me was the single most romantic thing that has ever happened to me.
I was vaguely aware by then that community had always been lacking -- that my family of origin had always been a little negligent, that the polya scene was always too distracted by sex and rules, that caregiving had never been apolitical and anyone who felt otherwise was feeding a system of exploitation, that when one's survival is deeply entwined with another's it's really hard to keep strict boundaries between platonic/romantic/professional relationships -- and I told myself I'd find it after the move.
Then came COVID. Watching the rise and fall of Public Health just when I was ready to get to work was only disheartening to the extent I had bothered to still have hopes about humanity. It was unpleasant, and unceasing, but not unexpected. I did get more clarity about what I'd always been missing, fighting for, running from -- and all it cost me was a stable society. With clarity, the meaningful ties started emerging without having to seek. An online friendship here. A shared conviction there. A classmate somewhere else. And of course a lot of practice in negotiating offline friendships to online and back. And I'm pretty good at that stuff. So wherever I go, I am relatively confident I'll be able to find and make community ties.
One more setback, though. For all those years, I took my body for granted. There would be a fix, a solution, an adjustment, any time my mindbody started to act in unfamiliar ways. I was really good at experimenting, and I had the freedom to tweak my life incessantly. But as my Long COVID really settles in, I have to confront just how unfamiliar my own body is now. And that is the home I dread losing the most. Like this move, it's abrupt and dragging all at the same time. If I knew where I would end up, I swear I'd make do, but every day I stumble over something I thought I understood and it just opens a floodgate of things I am not ready to accept. But why should I? They might be different tomorrow?
There was a time when feeling instability in my bodymind would just encourage me to lean harder into other ties, but at this point I'm over that sort of binary thinking. Although I don't think NP fully appreciates it, I'm trying to select a new place that would deepen my relationship with my bodymind rather than than reinforce existing bad habits. In particular, I want to go car-free, but I don't know if I can show my household what a joy that can be. Time will tell.
In the meantime, our top 10 is down to a top 6-ish and the money for travel is ready, if we don't spend it on other disruptions first.
[Kinda ran out of steam there at the end, guess it's time to go eat again, even though I'm not remotely hungry.]
no subject
Date: 2026-02-07 03:58 am (UTC)Edit: I left home right after highschool, and came back here after a decade on Puget Sound. Still struggling with relationships and how to begin them with people who will be healthy with me. I've got an interesting track record, to say the least.
Grief while Planning
Date: 2026-02-09 06:50 pm (UTC)I hear your overall grief around your bodymind needs changing in ways that are unfamiliar to you while also navigating the desires you have to build a new life and set yourself up for great future habits. This is so hard and so real. It is something all spoonies go through in various ways when coming to terms with disability. For me I have coped by relating my past notions/desires for control of my bodymind to the colonized/indoctrinated desire to dominate nature, rather than being in reciprocal relationship with it. That helped me let go of the control and focus on the *conversation* with my changing bodymind.
The access frictions in your need for no car, which doesn't seem to be something they want to prioritize. I am happy to ideate around solutions for this if that is wanted no pressure. Overall the learning your new bodymind needs is an ongoing process. The fluctuation is hard and grieving the past stability is real. Everyone deals with that grief differently. This is where I want to ask how to you process grief? I deal with it by talking it out with people who have been there. :hugs: