It has been true so long that now it is almost funny. When I am being really really self-hating… the fastest way to break that mood chain is to get cranky at someone else.

This time I’m cranky at a friend who said something true but in a very unkind way. It isn’t that this friend is wrong. It is that the delivery… wow that was… shit dude. You never ever get to comment on my lack of tact again. Fuck.

Who is the asshole in this relationship? I think that answer is both of us.

I also think that the solution to my problem isn’t completely where my friend thinks it is… even though that was a true statement.

It was also a very blamey statement and whoa. Given the shithole I have climbed out of, telling me that all my problems are because of _____ is a bit uhm.

Yeah.

I had kind of an interesting set of realizations. (This won’t be as long as I want it to be because of pain.) I do not aspire to have a concrete set of boundaries I present to the world as “who I am”.

I truly don’t. I don’t want to have a set persona and this is who I am and this is how I must be treated. How I must be treated varies from person to person and is in large part constructed based on our past experiences and reasonable expectations between us.

I exist in context of my life. Different people have different kinds of access to me for very complicated reasons and those are not strictly tied to how long I’ve known them nor what kind of previous exchange of relationship duties we’ve had.

Even though Jenny is my oldest friend and has been there through some of the most fucktastically intense moments she isn’t one of the people I can be most assuming with. She has boundaries of her own. So that relationship is shaped by our mutual agreements.

Ok, this is what I’m arguing with. But I’m not going to give you context for why it was brought up.

I think I am mostly motivated to argue against it as hard as I am right now because I am so pissed off with the delivery around it. I am not very rational like that. I don’t overall mostly think it is wrong. Only I strongly disagree that I have to want autonomy and to not compromise.

I do make special rules for people to show them that they are special. I like it that way and I am not going to give up on that because someone else thinks it would be a superior lifestyle. Maybe you have had the kind of life where you can have one united front of personality. I didn’t.

I don’t think each relationship with outside persons is independent. I think that a relationship with X is compounded by the fact that they are dating Y who is dating Z who is dating A who is dating…

That whole chain impacts my life. I care about the whole fucking thing and that makes discussions about boundaries not about a bunch of autonomous people negotiating one to one in my opinion.

Long story short: it occurs to me (after being asked, cause I’m a self absorbed bastard like that) that we should talk to the folks we want to see in the future this month before we finalize agreements and stuff between us. We aren’t negotiating about imaginary possible people. We are negotiating about people who are already embedded in our lives. That’s a lot of layers of extra complication.

Oh. Shit. Yeah. Thinking about everyone’s feelings. Shit. Shit. Shit. Yeah. We are supposed to do that.

Oh.

Whoops.

Usually I like coming to folks and saying “I want x. Yes or no.” But this is deeper than that. Quite frankly, these are mostly folks where we already love them and that means this really should be an actual conversation.

Oh fuck polyamory.

I DON’T WANNA BE A GROWN UP. FUCK RESPONSIBILITY. FUCK CALCULUS.

Then be monogamous you skank.

…. Ok fine we can talk.

Fuck.