Commentary on A dialogue in the horror of “I love you”

#ThingsYouCantUnsay #BreakingUp

I have been exploring some of my traumas that feel the hardest to explain in a world where happily ever after is a thing, “I love you” solves everything, and sex is good.

I don’t think I’m aromantic - I think I’m traumatized about the place of love in my life and especially with a conception of it where “love” is an action to itself, and being loved is the pinnacle of what we should seek in relationships - once achieve, maintaining that state is paramount. My impulse to seek other ways to express my affection, combined with my occasional blinding terror, indicate to me that I’m trying to approach something that is rife with un-processed trauma triggers.

The memory wipes were a particular feature of my experience of saying “I love you.” As though it were supposed to smooth away all hurts, disagreements, and relationship imperfections.

But the *expectation* that I felt when I heard “I love you” lurks as an especially terrifying unprocessed mass. It was an anchor. A tether. As long as there was “I love you,” I could only go so far. Transgressing that border was something I understood as morally wrong.

It’s incredibly hard to grow when you feel tied down. And so growth was something I avoided.

When I finally decided that loving myself was more important than staying inside those borders, I found that they had been recast as boundaries. I was hemmed in by assertions of boundary crossing.

I recreated the same situation in my next relationship, but I followed the thread back, back, to the beginning of my lack of boundaries.

I’m still learning about my traumas. My body tried to remind me of them, of things I’ve forgotten. I still don’t really know what I’m like under all the masks and damage. The “bodynomicon,” the record of my traumas in my body, is my body’s statement of self love. It’s a way to understand her, and to understand myself.

3/3

An Unbinding

#ThingsYouCantUnsay #BreakingUp #TransFemmeFocus

Some shit hurts. Other parts of me feel like I’ve finally unhooked the last parts of the entity that was my prison for decades - I couldn’t exist outside it. Eventually I overtook its dynamo, and I found the nutrients I needed, and I grew strong, and I broke my prison. My life begins.

And she was there for so long. She bore my children - children I cannot bear myself. She nurtured them. She was nearby as I peered out from the barred windows. She married the entity that I couldn’t escape. I watched her, but I didn’t understand her. And now I stand, arisen and revealed, and she is crushed by the way I don’t act like the entity.

That entity died on Tuesday night. I felt its pain, its sorrow, and its loss in its final moments.

As it spoke the words of breaking it had feared for so long.

They were my words. An unbinding. But I felt its pain, as I unmade it.

I mourn it now.