Mess As Medicine

transmissions from the notes app & my queer breakups

I have a lot of time to think right now.

We’ve just moved from a short-term furnished rental apartment into our more long-term home here in England, and getting wifi set up here has been a bit more complicated than expected. In America, you simply call the scam artists who control the utility you need, and you can have it turned on that day for an exorbitant amount of money. Maybe the next business day if everything goes to shit. Problem solved. Here, they want to do a credit check and then schedule an engineer to come out to your house “within a few weeks.” Even if said property has had wifi before, even if said wifi router is sitting within your line of sight while you’re on the phone with the guy who’s telling you they need several weeks for a technician to come out. I’m the technician! I can plug in the box!

Anyway — all this to say I’ve been spending a lot of time chopping vegetables to make soup stock and taking account of the defining queer relationships I had before leaving LA. We’re loving small town life so far. When we step outside on a sunny day, our little village feels like Richard Scarry’s Busy Town. You look up and down the main drag (which is a collection of like 6 shops) and see people greeting each other with handshakes and smiles. When people hear our accents they’ve been keen to offer help and answer questions, and anxiously check to see if their countrymen have been welcoming (they have! Except for my nemesis at Vodaphone).¹ Our first day in town was also the occasion of the church fête (lost Americans, please see the church carnival in season 2 of Fleabag for reference, except the priest at our local church is decidedly not hot), and we won a bottle of wine from the tombola. It’s very cute here. It is not a happening queer dating scene.

My brain, therefore, has been performing a retrospective of my queer dating life while I dice onions. It has been making the unfair and stressful assumption that it’s all over for me re: dating thirds and doing kink with people who are reasonably removed from my social circles. Time will tell. For now, I’ve been graced with a new clarity about my “type” and what went wrong with a number of past connections.

Before now, I couldn’t put a finger on exactly what the recurring theme was between the women I’ve had debilitating crushes on. There was the posh world traveler and aspiring filmmaker from Chengdu who held my hand in the rain in Berlin but later told me she “wasn’t like me” (aka queer), thus shattering my 20-year-old heart to the point that I wrote sad prose poetry about her for at least two years afterwards. There was the hot-and-cold tattooed brunette who was a former sub of my Dom’s and whom we dated together until she ghosted (after she sent us a lovely floral arrangement on our wedding day). Then there was the freshly-out-as-queer married girl whose extremely religious upbringing had led her to spend her formative years climbing trees in rural Africa, fostering a charming wildness she brought into adulthood and our relationship until the feelings became too much and she had to abruptly pull her parachute. I cried over her until my chest ached, and I got into a bunch of new forms of DIY to cope:

(Fellas, is it gay to make a grief cyanotype using the pressed leaves your ex-lover gave you before leaving you so devastated you start doing ‘Disco In The Dark’ classes to have a safe place to cry? Is it??)

Most people never see their own patterns with dating. A chosen few come up with some kind of forensics on what’s going on, but the conclusions they draw might be wrong or slightly to the side of reality. The absolute top-tier elite may admit that there’s a common bad feeling they either seek out or accidentally fall into again and again. On paper, these women were whimsical and intense and all had dark eyes and perfect lips. Was that my type? Would any woman fitting that bill do a brutal overhand tennis serve on my heart and leave me reeling?

My big Capital B breakthrough came during an office hours session with one of you in the last month (don’t freak out, this will be completely anonymized!!) This person is a Dom(me), and was repeatedly connecting with subs who didn’t know how to describe what they liked/wanted to do sexually. Either the subs were too shy or too green, but this person and I had discussed before that it’s totally reasonable if not mandatory for a Dom(me) to insist upon their subs stating what they want before play can begin. Then this Dom(me) came back to me to discuss a new connection, this time with the inverse problem: the sub refused to tell this Dom(me) what their boundaries were in any kind of specificity, stating it was a boundary of theirs to not say what their limits are. Again, the question hung in the air about whether it was messed up of this Dom(me) to press the issue, particularly if it was being framed as a limit of the sub’s. My take was that if you’re not ready to state your interests AND limits clearly, you’re not ready to do kink. Reasons be damned.²

What this shone a light on for me was how these two themes were exactly opposite to each other and yet completely connected. And it’s a kind of tension I’ve found in connections with other subs, particularly those who broke my heart. It’s something certain subs will do who are on their own journeys with intimacy, or kink acceptance, or whatever, where they don’t feel ready to fully give over to the process, or don’t have the tools to be completely transparent, so they present the person they want to be as the connection is forming, and then get freaked out when they have to keep showing up as that person. As the recipient of this energy, you get the feeling that you’re earning their attention not just in the natural trust-building ways that are required of D/s, but by having to mind-read or make yourself smaller to adjust to the size of their interest or fear on a given day. This might not make sense if you haven’t been through it, but the more I reflected on this, the more I realized the women I’d connected with so intensely were those for whom I compromised on my own boundaries. The greater the compromise, the more heartsick I was.

During my devastating collegiate sapphic crush, I let her conflicted feelings about her own queerness run the show, suppressing what I already knew about myself so that I could make her comfortable.

With the tattooed third, I made extra space for her hurt feelings about my Dom, about relationships in general, about her queer identity, by trying to be agreeable with whatever she needed.

With the cyanotype muse, I could see the train wreck coming from a mile away — this was her first experience opening up her marriage, she was freshly queer — and I pretended the intensity of her sub frenzy meant she was also dealing with the emotional ramifications behind the scenes, knowing full well it could come to a screeching halt at any moment. But I did anything I could to bend and make myself (and our dynamic) fit for just one more week, day, hour — even at the expense of boundaries my Dom and I had had in place for years before her arrival.

And why would I do these things? I mean, as a twenty-year-old I did it because that’s simply what you do at that age. But in my late twenties and early thirties? I think the self-betrayal was a form of escapism. See this late-night notes app scrawl:

check out that european-ass military time

Each of these women allowed me to bifurcate myself at times when I needed to have a retreat to go to from my ‘real’ self. The first came into my life when I was in a long and disappointing relationship with my high school boyfriend. We danced the night away in Berlin as I celebrated my first experiment with openness — all of it validating that I really was queer and really could be desired. The second woman actually had the idea for my Dom and I to start dating thirds, as she proposed it to Him after we closed our relationship and they broke up. I launched myself straight into that mess because of my unhealthy fixation on what I could possibly mean to a man who had so much experience with other subs (lol we are married now). We then picked up with her again during the pandemic when I was asking huge questions about my longterm goals and who I was going to be moving forward. And the most recent one gave me a much-needed distraction and feeling of worthiness at one of my life’s most challenging nadirs — the months after I went no-contact with my family of origin following a year in which I had two miscarriages.

I’ve said here many times I’m a staunch defender of mess. I’ve seen how messy relationships teach us, guide us, and show us what we do and don’t need. I’m not talking about long-term high-conflict situations where people truly don’t like each other. I’m talking about those interstitial moments in life, the moments where we intersect with another person on the shifting tides of their own journey and together build strange floating homes made of sticks just to get ourselves further down the river. The homes built on real foundations are just too much work when we’re drowning.

The problem is when you only date people that telegraph, through their words or actions, that they’re making an exception for you. That you have to change or edit or censor yourself to fit into their comfort zone. Over time, you get the message that you’re too much, and consequently you can never expect to find someone for whom you don’t have to make massive compromises. And yes, we do have to make compromises in every relationship, but not on who we are and what we need.³ And this off-kilter quality, the way some people make us feel like the connection is contingent on a certain kind of dysregulating performance on our part, is fundamentally at odds with being on equal footing with our partners — the very equal footing that makes D/s and kink sustainable, safe, and adult. But it’s only natural that our scarcity mindsets might make us so willing to mortgage our feeling of safety for just one more hit of frenzy.

I am 100% culpable for getting myself into these situations where I was willing to accept less in order to get more from someone who wasn’t really available for me. To be totally clear, these women weren’t waking up every day methodically planning out how to be inconsistent and unavailable to intentionally harm me. I was the rat banging against the inconsistent reward button, addicted to the rush of earning affection that came at a high price (thanks, mom and dad!). I was the one with the most visibility into what hurt, but I kept going back anyway. And you know what? I don’t regret the emotional pain for a second. What I do regret is the amount of time I spent feeling like these are the only circumstances in which deep connection can happen.⁴ But these weren’t connections, they were awkward misalignments that would have been perfect if absolutely everything had been different.

My typical instinct for finishing these essays is to make a public declaration about what I’m going to do differently moving forward, but that doesn’t feel authentic here. I think mess is a kind of medicine I reach for at times when nothing else will do, and I may do it again. Because if you’re not getting so emotionally thrashed that you pick up a new crafting hobby — are you really living? If you’re not getting so twisted up by a woman’s inconsistent texts that you write an essay about it on substack which she finds, hates, and texts you a screed about a year later — are you even queer? For that matter, if you’re not feeling the addict’s twitch as you think about suppressing your needs in order to court a new beautiful woman — how is your dating life supposed to have the spice that makes it all worth putting pants (or a dress and no panties as the case may be) on to leave the house?

These are the unanswerable questions of our time. To leave them unanswered is to bow in namaste from the mess in me to the mess in you. 🙏

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1. If you’re one of my many helpful UK readers, don’t worry, we’ve now sorted it out and we’re going with Virgin Wireless!! Hopefully they don’t screw me!!

2. Subs: it’s completely fine to state your limits to a Dom without giving the reasons behind them if this is what you need to feel comfortable, accommodate trauma, or simply build trust. Limits should be taken at face value with no further questions. What’s not ok is refusing to communicate and make a collaborative environment for your Dom so you can work together to have a nice time. For example, maybe you don’t like hair pulling because you had a specific bad experience with it. You can say “hair pulling is a limit for me” without saying why, that’s totally fine. But don’t say “I won’t tell you any of my limits” and hope that they can somehow divine that they shouldn’t pull your hair. Imagine being on the receiving end of that! Very stressful! That is if the Dom is a good person and not a total psychopath who’s unconcerned with your experience. I go over this stuff in more detail in my Sub Survival Guide course 🖤

3. Needs and wants are different and identifying the difference is a lifelong job.

4. For reasons that are currently between me and my therapist, I don’t attach to men with this exact pattern and for that I’m very lucky. I’m so grateful to my Dom for holding me and giving me space to go through these last two sapphic heartbreaks from within our relationship. The way that all this is even further complicated by dating as a couple is worth exploring but not in today’s essay because I have more vegetables to go chop.