The Best Life Yet

I am having a shit couple of days. I've been working so much that I got less than three hours of sleep last night, all in little 20–40-minute nap chunks. My libido toward Rider tanked completely Saturday evening after learning that he had sex with Hannah for the first time—a very strange reaction and a totally new one on me. And Jasper got weirded out when Rider showed up at the protest Saturday afternoon and is "taking some space" currently, i.e., has canceled both of the plans we'd made this week and is going to contact me when he feels more "settled."

I would go into more detail because there is a lot more to say, but honestly, the time is better spent napping at this point.
 
Rider brought me flowers, wine, olive bread, and cheese. He loves me. And I love him, too, but I feel super guilty for not wanting him sexually right now.

I miss Jasper fiercely—even just the friendship we were growing, absurd physical chemistry completely aside. I just wish I could be texting dorky stuff with him right now.

Adding injury to insult, I suddenly am having a bit of mild tooth pain, which has never happened to me before (not even when I needed fillings once in my mid-20s). I do not have dental insurance and was waiting till I get on Rider's after we are married. I guess I just wait it out and see if it goes away?

FML right now.
 
I have, in the last year, gotten on this new endeavor of taking better care of my teeth (among other things I'm trying to do better for myself.)

I did not used to have consistent flossing habits. I now do. It helps a lot.

I am down to my last wisdom tooth but it's the only one which has never been infected or caused me any pain, so I'll wait to eventually have it out, I'm in no hurry.

Due to the inconsistent flossing, I didn't know as a bad cavity was developing hidden on the back side of a molar in between the teeth. No one could have seen it. That necessitated a root canal. Not fun, and expensive (though I got a deal with my dentist but that's another story, not relevant.)

So certain flags that you might need a root canal (damage to the root, nerve death of the tooth, not something you can ignore or reverse) or simply to have a tooth removed (the only alternative)... If a tooth is painful or sensitive to hot or cold and continues to hurt after you remove the stimuli, a bump or swelling of nearby gum tissue, or darkening of the tooth.

It's more common to just get a bit of infection from some bit of something down in your gums. One thing I tried that helped, I bought some Manuka honey which is a natural antibiotic, and used a clean finger to get it around the tooth, even flossing some down into the affected gums. Then after a while (about an hour) I carefully brushed and flossed to clean the area. I know it's putting sugars into there, but it was the only topical antibiotic that I could think of that was safe to use in the mouth. I did this three times in a day, and it cleared up the infection. But I was also doing everything I could to make sure there was not any lingering...foodstuff...down in the gums. That's a very typical cause of tooth pain.

Other than pain reliever drugs like Tylenol, Ibuprofin, or Oragel...that's the only home remedy type stuff I know of. But if it hurts badly enough, you will end up seeing a dentist regardless of cost. Some of them will let you do some sort of a payment plan.

Hope it doesn't come to that! Hope it feels better soon!
 
Spork said:
I have, in the last year, gotten on this new endeavor of taking better care of my teeth (among other things I'm trying to do better for myself.)

I did not used to have consistent flossing habits. I now do. It helps a lot.

I am down to my last wisdom tooth but it's the only one which has never been infected or caused me any pain, so I'll wait to eventually have it out, I'm in no hurry.

Due to the inconsistent flossing, I didn't know as a bad cavity was developing hidden on the back side of a molar in between the teeth. No one could have seen it. That necessitated a root canal. Not fun, and expensive (though I got a deal with my dentist but that's another story, not relevant.)

So certain flags that you might need a root canal (damage to the root, nerve death of the tooth, not something you can ignore or reverse) or simply to have a tooth removed (the only alternative)... If a tooth is painful or sensitive to hot or cold and continues to hurt after you remove the stimuli, a bump or swelling of nearby gum tissue, or darkening of the tooth.

It's more common to just get a bit of infection from some bit of something down in your gums. One thing I tried that helped, I bought some Manuka honey which is a natural antibiotic, and used a clean finger to get it around the tooth, even flossing some down into the affected gums. Then after a while (about an hour) I carefully brushed and flossed to clean the area. I know it's putting sugars into there, but it was the only topical antibiotic that I could think of that was safe to use in the mouth. I did this three times in a day, and it cleared up the infection. But I was also doing everything I could to make sure there was not any lingering...foodstuff...down in the gums. That's a very typical cause of tooth pain.

Other than pain reliever drugs like Tylenol, Ibuprofin, or Oragel...that's the only home remedy type stuff I know of. But if it hurts badly enough, you will end up seeing a dentist regardless of cost. Some of them will let you do some sort of a payment plan.

Hope it doesn't come to that! Hope it feels better soon!
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Thanks for all of that. It actually does feel totally better today. I wonder if I'm just like unconsciously grinding my teeth or something from all the stress I'm under. As long as whatever it is can keep its shit together till about May, I was planning on going into the dentist anyway once I have the insurance. I guess we'll see . . .

With the tooth pain gone, my only suffering is related to sleep deprivation and the pain of missing Jasper. I managed to rally and give Rider a HJ last night, which he was totally satisfied with, so that assuaged the guilt on that end too. No need to make him suffer just because I am.
 
Reverie said:
Thanks for all of that. It actually does feel totally better today. I wonder if I'm just like unconsciously grinding my teeth or something from all the stress I'm under. As long as whatever it is can keep its shit together till about May, I was planning on going into the dentist anyway once I have the insurance. I guess we'll see . . .

With the tooth pain gone, my only suffering is related to sleep deprivation and the pain of missing Jasper. I managed to rally and give Rider a HJ last night, which he was totally satisfied with, so that assuaged the guilt on that end too. No need to make him suffer just because I am.
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I'm glad to hear that! Tooth pain is the worst.

I hope that the rest heals soon, too. *hugs*

Also, as someone who considered going out to the protests, but opted instead to take care of some very important and time sensitive personal finance tasks that needed doing... I know I'm not the only woman who was either conflicted about going, or wanted to be there but didn't make it. Those of you who stepped up and WENT, were representing something bigger and more than just your own self, and women like me, owe women like YOU, a very very big THANK YOU.
 
I miss Jasper sooooo much and I don't have anyone to whine to about it.

Normally it would be Oona but she's going through her own breakup stuff (maybe actually permanently this time) and her relationship was much more established so I can't go on too long about my measly little one-month, "no labels" thing.

And normally I'd whine more here, but it takes longer to type stuff out than to talk and I'm barely getting sleep because of work, so a long, wallowy post is not in the cards for me. :( :( :(
 
Time with Jasper used to give me something to look forward to so that I was excited when Rider had dates with Hannah ("go! do your thing!") and now that I no longer have that excitement and am instead rather heartbroken, I am finding it very hard to be charitable and am back to feeling unhappy about it—but actually worse than before.
 
In our processing discussion yesterday, it came out that Rider is backpedaling and not sure if he actually still wants to get married or do our open-lite thing after all. Which, if he doesn't, we probably need to break up. I've gotten like 16 hours of sleep in the past 4 nights. I still haven't heard any peep from Jasper. Trump is ruining so many things.

THIS IS THE WORST WEEK EVER.
 
(((hugs)))

I hope you and Rider can work together and figure out what is best for both of you, whatever that looks like.
 
Oh no. :( Is it possible to try and back burner stressful stuff and give each other some care and affection, try to maybe address and work through stuff after things calm a little?
 
Reverie said:
In our processing discussion yesterday, it came out that Rider is backpedaling and not sure if he actually still wants to get married or do our open-lite thing after all. Which, if he doesn't, we probably need to break up. I've gotten like 16 hours of sleep in the past 4 nights.
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Ouch :(
Don't do processing when you're exhausted is better said then done, right? But I really think you should wait with any discussions. Ask for what you need just to get through here.
 
I hope you're able to get through this turmoil before having that convo, and especially sleep. Sleep is so important.. :( Sorry Reverie.
 
I agree with Tinwen on waiting till you are not so tired, if that is at all possible.

I hope it works out in whatever way allows you to have the life you want and deserve.
 
Things are mostly better again. Thank you everyone, for your concern and support.

I got a little more sleep last night—only about six hours, but better than the 2–4 I'd been getting the rest of the week. The deadline I've been busting my ass on got extended a week, which is both good (yay, I got some sleep!) and bad (boo, I have to keep working on this shit for longer!).

I wrote Rider a long letter yesterday, addressing some concerns that had come up in our processing the previous night. His main gripes were these:

1) I used to talk about wanting a big, happy kitchen-table-style polyfamily, and he feels like now that he has found someone else who he thinks would fit in such a thing, I don't want it anymore.

2) He feels like I have been unfairly moving goalposts and is worried that the latest stuff I have on offer might just be more of the same. That is, he didn't believe me when I told him I only offered stuff that I am 100% comfortable with.

3) He's been sitting on some resentment that I sometimes ask him if I can do things that he knows I wouldn't be happy if he did them, even if it is actually OK with him that I do them. We had a long discussion about that the other night—the fair vs. equal thing, etc.

At the time, I'd been able to about half-explain stuff. It's hard for me to think on my feet verbally sometimes, especially when exhausted. So I answered that stuff later, the best I could, in the letter. I'm going to excerpt it here, with caveats that I was running on very little sleep:

One issue that I wanted to address was the whole thing of wanting a polyfamily. So last night, you were looking at me like I was completely insane for having changed my mind about this, and I feel like I wasn’t able to explain properly the full mechanics of the thing.

So, I guess there are a few main ingredients here. The first is that thing we talked about last night: the theory vs. reality thing. You probably already know about me that sometimes I take a few days to process and identify feelings when I have them. Sometimes I’m slow to even realize what I’m feeling when a thing has already happened, in other words. So honestly, it is not terribly surprising to me to discover that it is next to impossible to predict how I *will* feel about something that I have never even experienced yet. It’s not ideal, I know, but it’s the truth.

Maybe one “speedbump” for this for me in life is for me to try to remember to say “I think I might like X” or “I’ve always wanted to try X” when it is something I’ve never tried, rather than “X is what I want.” That leaves space for me to be wrong without anyone feeling lied to. It’s a small semantic difference, but, perhaps, an important one?

The second main ingredient is the imbalance factor. I really liked the idea of polyfamily BEFORE I realized how hard it would be for me to find someone—before I tried for a three years and all I ever got was burned. I actually WAS really stoked on the idea of having a get together with other partners at some point. I DID like how at Perry's party, it was cool if I stuck by Jasper’s side because you had someone else to occupy you and wouldn’t feel left out. It’s not IMPOSSIBLE for me to enjoy “polyfamily” dynamics. I just can absolutely NOT be the third wheel left out with no other person of my own. The imbalance drives me crazy. And THIS is the reason I specifically said to you a couple weeks ago that I’m in a “never say never” spot with poly—if I were to have someone fall into my lap who seemed to fit the bill, I’d reconsider. I technically still like the IDEA. But the reality? With the imbalance that seems doomed to exist? It’s a HELL NO for me at this point.

The third main ingredient is my relationship to the metamour person. I think what I realized after we talked last night is that a big part of why people I also share mutual attraction with get a pass on my feeling the pinch is not shallowness at all. It’s that it’s kind of a subspecies of balance. If you and I EACH have our own person, there is balance. If you and I are both involved with a person, there is balance. If the attraction only exists between you and one other person, with me having nothing extra, there is no balance. Imbalance slays me here. And I think that the further I am from being involved in the situation, the less balanced it feels, like how when you put something out further on a seesaw, it tips easier. I hope this makes sense.

So that ties up "polyfamily," I think.
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Another issue where "theory vs. reality" comes strongly into play is the idea of moving goal posts. So. When I started out in poly—before you, even—I had this idea of how amazing would it be to live in almost a little commune, with best friends and partners and partners' partners. It wasn't until I had that suckerpunch-to-the-gut feeling when I saw that Pandora station publish to Claire's feed that time that I had my first inkling that, whoa, no, I might NOT want to be in a situation where it would be evident to me exactly when/where my partner was having sex with their other partner. Much less, god forbid, overhear it.

I struggled with this again when the issue of you wanting to have sex with Kelly at Sam’s house came up. When you first asked me, I couldn't come up with a LOGICAL reason to say no, in theory, but then when I remembered the Pandora thing, I suddenly had a very strong "oh wait I actually DO have experience (mildly) with the reality of this thing, and I don't like it" and I had to let you know.

Every time a "goal post" has been moved, it's because I started out with this crazy idealistic idea of something I'd never experienced, and some experience in real life would happen and everything in my being would just be like NOOOOPE! But instead of just flipping all the way over to "fuck ALL this shit"—because that seemed extreme—it felt more reasonable to me to be like "OK, no, just fuck this corner over here that I've explored; the rest is probably fine." It was optimism.

And so, we did a bunch of stuff. We've had a ton of crazy adventures. We've had threesomes with girls and boys and solo experiences with girls and boys and spent weekends apart and spent weekends with other people together. We've wingmanned each other. We've schemed and plotted stuff that never got to come true. We've pretty much run the gamut.

Having run the gamut, I now feel like I pretty definitively know what works for me and under what circumstances.

(I went on to detail a bunch of different scenarios not really worth getting into here.)

So. That is how I feel about "goalposts," having now lived a poly life for as long as I have. THIS is why in our discussion recently, I only offered you the stuff that I feel HELL YES about—the stuff that comes with zero processing. I am soooo tired of processing.
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I now know that it annoys you that I ask for things that you'd rather me not ask for if you can't have them too. It's moot at the moment, since I'm not even with Jasper and am totally over dating new people. But I did want to point out that I wasn't just trying to be a hypocritical jerk. If poly is hard for me, and making progress with Jasper was making it easier for me (hypothetically, before stuff blew up), then it was also in your best interest to do things that make it easier for me. The more wrapped up in Jasper I was, the less I cared about whatever you got up to with other people. The more Jasper got from me, the more likely he seemed to be to want to stick around and prevent the imbalance from recurring.

I don't think there has ever been a time when the imbalance has been in MY favor, not yours. Maaaaybe you could count the weekend I spent with Beckett when he was here. But we didn't even kiss, so I probably wouldn't.

When I've asked you for imbalanced things that I can't tolerate, myself, I truly didn't see anything wrong with it. I was doing it in order to try to make my thing with Jasper fly, so that we wouldn't end up in exactly the situation we are in right now. And I truly thought you wouldn't care—that I'd be helping us ALL and hurting no one. I'd be helping Jasper by giving him more love. I'd be helping myself because with more love, Jasper might stick around. And I'd be helping you and Hannah because while Jasper was around, nothing was imbalanced and therefore I wasn't dwelling on every little thing. AND I figured that if I asked, and it DID bother you, you'd just say no, not say yes and resent it.

So, I'm sorry. I didn't know it would upset you or (obviously) I wouldn't have done it.
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(continued . . .)
 
(. . . continued from previous)Rider had said he was already feeling better before I even sent the letter, but then when he read it, it really helped even more. He said he feels like he understands my inner workings better and the way that I feel and act makes a lot more sense to him now.

The previous night, he'd expressed a great deal of exasperation that he can't even imagine feeling the way I do, so it's really hard for him to wrap his head around it. I'd called him out that even though he'd stopped (at my insistence, about two years ago) telling me how I "should feel," I was pretty sure he's been still thinking it inside his head this whole time, and it was causing resentment to build that I didn't feel how he thought that I "should."

I think my letter helped him to find some measure of empathy for me that was elusive before. WHAT IF he wanted a thing, idealistically, only to find that after trying for three years, striving for it had only hurt him? WHAT IF he was always the one to have to stand by and watch his partner have success where he failed, on something that affected them both? WHAT IF he'd done everything he could think of: dating sites, poly meetups, meeting people in bars, trying to make things happen with friends and friends of friends, and couldn't find another suitable partner? WHAT IF he'd tried therapy and meditation and self-help books and endless blog processing and had never been able to overcome the misery caused by that imbalance? And then, WHAT IF his cherished partner saw all of that frustration and misery as inconvenient impediments to his own happiness—something that "should" be easily gotten over?

I think that for all my feeling inhuman many times, still, empathy—true empathy—comes easier to me than it does to him. Because I fully knew, coming to him with all of this stuff in the first place, that it was going to suck for him. I knew he was going to be unhappy at having to make a tough choice. I knew why. And at the same time as I felt my own relief at finally unburdening myself, I felt terrible sadness that he had to shoulder a burden for a while, because I truly understood how much it SUCKED. I grieved for him in his having to grieve one or the other important-to-him thing.

But I think that, since HE isn't ever on the other side of our poly imbalance (and therefore doesn't struggle much), he just found my struggling unfathomable and inconvenient at best, and an attempt to corner, manipulate, or control him at worst. Additionally, since he has never been so long-term unsuccessful, even if there WERE suddenly to be an imbalance, he would at least have the long periods of success in his history to reassure him that good things were just over the horizon. When all I've experienced has been defeat, I have no privilege of such assumptions.

I think my letter was able to basically shoehorn some empathy into him. I certainly feel respected and heard in a way that I didn't during our conversation before the letter.

Rider is back to wanting to stay on track to get married. Additionally, he has told me he'll write me a reply letter—that he has a lot of things to say. I await hearing what they are. Yesterday, before Rider received my letter so well, I was feeling very unstable and jerked around. But the way he's been behaving since has me back to feeling solid again. Maybe I shouldn't, but I do. Oona thinks I'm crazy for continuing with wedding plans when it seems like we're thinking of breaking up every few weeks lately. I think that it's actually pretty healthy to be thrashing out any remaining doubts and potential big issues before we go through with it, and talking about dissolving if necessary, if it turns out these things are irreconcilable.

In other news, I received a small communication from Jasper. He texted me, thanking me for letting him take the space he needs, telling me he cares about me, reassuring me that he hasn't completely ghosted, and updating me that he still needs time. I thanked him for the update and basically told him to get in touch when he's ready to talk more or hang out. I've really worked on dismantling my emotional investment in him. I have no idea what will happen when/if I actually see him again, but the pain of missing him is less intense now than it was a few days ago.

I didn't even tell the story of that weekend yet, ugh! Been too busy to write. The short version is that he made a great date to Perry's "Fuck Trump" party, met most of my friends and they all like each other. He was not shy with the affection, even texting me a heart from the bathroom even though I was right in the next room, haha. Rider was there with Hannah. Jasper and Hannah got along great and it turned out they even have friends in common. Jasper and I went back to his place after the party. We woke up in the morning and went to the protest. Things seemed fine until we met up with Rider. Then Jasper wanted to go off by himself and we haven't been together in any real fashion since then. So that's that story. I just hope that we can at least be friends. I really like him as a person—any romance/sex stuff completely aside.

ETA: somehow I accidentally marked this post with a little thumbs-down guy. THE OPPOSITE OF THAT!
 
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