The thing I hate most about my life.

Is not that I’m transgendered. I’m cool with that. No, actually I’m very, very happy with that. It’s a big part of not just what, but who I am.

It’s not that my sexuality seems to have shifted a little. I may not be overly fond of the fact that I’m what I think of as a 5% bisexual. But I don’t hate it, I just don’t hugely like it either. After all your sexuality isn’t something to love or hate, it just is.

It’s not even the way that I am always sick, hard as that may be to believe. And believe me when I say that always being sick is a very hard road to travel. Never being able to plan more than a couple of days ahead, simply because it’s impossible to predict what your body will be capable of in a few days time. Not being able to do the things you love, because they hurt too much. It does suck. But after so many years like this being ill has become rather like my sexuality. Just something that is.

I don’t hate that I’m kinky, or poly. More love is usually better (barring the occasional psycho second partner, or that rare person who simply is incompatible with your other partner), and how can finding ever more interesting ways of expressing that love be a bad thing?

Nope, the thing I hate most about my life is the, for me, immeasurable hurt that my existence in her life has caused my partner. Well more precisely the hurt my existence has allowed other people to cause her.

I adore my Partner in Crime. I simply could not wish for a better partner. She’s loving, caring, intelligent, sexy, beautiful, and unlike me can actually cook. And after almost 9 years in each others lives I would be hard-pressed to come up with much of anything about her that I don’t love. She’s given me 9 years of mostly happiness. And I like to think that mostly that’s what I’ve brought her also. But my nature, which is so often an issue for people on the street, has also from time to time proven to be an insurmountable issue for members of her family, and I suspect for people who are now former friends.

So I hate that my existence means that she has lost inclusion by parts of her family. I hate that I’m the reason for her losing out on those relationships. I hate that my loving her has led to her missing important family events.

I come from a rather small family myself (excluding various adopted family members who rather dramatically increase the numbers). Just myself, my mom, and my brother. But I know how much it would hurt me to be excluded from anything that might happen in the years to come. So I can at least begin to imagine how this has hurt my Partner. And all I can do to make up for that hurt is to love her as much as I possibly can, while I try my hardest to deserve being in her life.

Anyway this post is really just about me getting this off of my chest. Its been bothering me a lot lately, and better to vent than to let it build up until I finally explode leveling a large part of Dublin County.

I cry a lot.

I cry an awful lot. Well at least I think that it’s an awful lot, it may actually be a very normal amount for any human being. So maybe it would be more accurate to say that from my point of view I cry a lot. And I cry for all sorts of reasons.

I cry because I’m happy.

I cry because I’m sad.

I cry because I lonely.

I cry because there’s no milk, and I really want a glass of milk.

That’s the thing, it’s not rational, or even all that predictable. And that annoys the frikkin’ hell out of me. But this week I’ve cried so much I’m starting to wonder just how many tears a body can hold. Even a body as large as mine. I keep thinking there has to be a limit, there has to be a point where my body will just stop. It never happens though.

Why this week? Well in a life that has always been filled with pain, and illness I’ve had a week from hell. For four days I managed to keep down a couple of spoonfuls of food a day. While my bum did an even better than normal impression of an inverted chocolate fountain, and let me tell you, that takes some doing. Rooms have spun, headaches have been experienced. And through it all I’ve been upset because my Partner in Crime has had the dubious pleasures of living with me at my physical worst, without the benefits of my being at my kinky worst.

The latter is what upsets me the most.

I have always believed that a human being without the sexual expression which is appropriate to them (lesbian, gay, asexual, furry, whatever expression of your particular flavour might be), is probably not really entirely sane. At the very least it can’t be healthy. And yet there’s this sexually appealing, and expressive woman who I know adores me, and all my get up and go, has got up and gone. It upsets me, it makes me feel horribly guilty. And I think that’s what people who aren’t permanently sick, or otherwise physically challenged often don’t understand.

The guilt.

The unending feeling that the person, or persons (for those poly-folk lucky enough to have another partner) that you don’t deserve them, and that they are wasting their lives with you. That they are wasting their (relative) youth on someone who might in some ways be far too old, far too young.

I’m a deeply sexual person. I think there may be 30 seconds in a row when sex doesn’t cross my mind in some form. I can’t be certain of it, but there might be. But I have a pretty limited sex life, simply because so much of the time I’m physically unable. For example, it’s been four years and three months since I was shown my place by my Miss in that delightful BDSM way, because my body can’t take it. Which leaves me continuously walking around with two questions chasing each others tails in my mind.

Why in the hell is she still interested in me at all? Yes, I know love. But contrary to what The Beatles had to say ont he subject, love is not all you need.

And.

When will I lose her? Yes I know on 99% of the levels of my mind that I won’t. But try telling that to the 1% that’s a frightened 12-year-old huddled in the corner wondering when the one person who makes her feel safe is going to say “Go away, I don’t love you, you’ve been replaced.” Go on, try to, ’cause believe me I’ve tried, and she ain’t listening.

Of course the stress from that feeds into the other stresses in your life, and that makes you feel sicker, and that stresses you more, so sicker, and so on, and so forth. Until the day when your body liquefies and you end up flushing down the toilet with the rest of the effluence.

I don’t know if there is a solution to this. Crying helps while it’s happening. But the guilt, and the fears are still there when I stop, they’re only overwhelmed by the physical sensation of crying, not healed. Talking about it…not so much, there’s only so many times you can be told that you’re silly before it stops helping, and that time is long past. In the end like so many other things in a persons life, it’s just another cross to bear. Just another trial to overcome.

I just wish for once that something would be easy.

Any break up is hard to live with, for more than just the loss of love.

Recently, some experiences conspired to teach me, the truth of just how hard break ups can be.  At the start of last Winter, myself and one of my partners broke up, this was after three great years together.  Now let me say right off the bat, that it was a genuinely mutual break up.  Our relationship had definitely run its course, and for our mutual happiness we needed to part, while we were still caring for one another.  The reality was, that if we had forced ourselves to continue, we would have simply wound up hating one another.  So, everything happened for the best.

Not that those facts made our relationships end even the slightest bit easier.  The fact is that any break up, whether you still genuinely care for the other person or not will be almost unbearably painful.  The fact that we lived together and continued to do so for another week, only made it doubly so.  Actually for that week, we drove my other partner quite mad with out constant crying and general moping about.

But that’s not what this blog is about.  Everyone knows that breaking up and thus losing the love of someone else, hurts, that is just a fact of life.

What this blog is about is how the other things you lose, can hurt almost as much.  I’m speaking here about the plans, the home, the things which had been integral parts of your daily life.  And worse still, those things you’d never got the chance to have together, but had always looked forward to.

After three years my two partners and I had built up a plan for our lives.  It included someday building a beautiful house for the three of us, a cross between a modern interpretation of  a Roman villa and a Norse longhouse.  The plan also included silly little things like a holiday in Iceland, a small internet business building custom PC casings, looking after one another as we grew old.  You know, being happy.

All of those ideas, hopes and dreams are at best now on an extended hold.  I mean of course they could still be done and some probably will happen. But I am left wondering if they will have the same joy, the same sparkle that they might otherwise have had?  Regardless, thinking about the things we had planned, that now we will never do together makes my chest ache, every time.

But in a break up if your relationship was good you will lose a lot of other things.  You will probably lose an entire other family.  I did, I was very fond of the elder of her two brothers, and I had eagerly looked forward to getting to know her other brother, as well as her mom and dad.  My ex lost out as well of course.  She simply adored my mother, and the sentiment was very much mutual.  My dog, who back then had been our dog, for example was still a fairly little puppy when we ended.  She hasn’t seen Winter since and that can’t be pleasant.  I know how much I miss the furball when I don’t see her for just a single day.  She also lost most of her relationship with my other partner.  She lost the home we had found here in Ireland for us all, when she still lived in London.  So did we a few weeks later, a place that big was simply unsupportable with just two of us.

This is all by way of a context for what I’ve been thinking a lot about lately.  The loss of one of my best friends from my life, a friend who had also been my lover and my slavegirl, has left me thinking about how transient everything in my life really is.  Some of my friends, people I see as family, will drift out of my life.  My beautiful puppydog Winter by virtue of her species will only live 17ish years.  Loves and lovers will drift in and out of my life. And worst of all as I get older I’ll start being called to attend more funerals than weddings.

But do you know what?

That’s alright.  I’m ready for this stage of my life to start.  When I met my ex she was lost and broken.  I was still a little naive and unseasoned as an adult.  None of that is true of either of us anymore.  We both grew from our time together.  We both left our relationship better and stronger than when we entered it.  We changed each other, all three of us.

The thing about change is that it’s natural, change is actually okay.  It comes from gaining and from losing and I’m happy that things change, ’cause maybe when they change my life will get even better.  I like better.  It makes me happy.