National Coming Out Day

Friday, October 11, was National Coming Out Day (NCOD). Founded in 1988, this day was created to celebrate the (very often difficult) process of coming out and to raise general awareness for the struggles of the LGBT community. Though I mostly came out to everyone I knew closely back in the summer of 2011 and somehow missed NCOD that year, I decided to post something on Facebook last year. I had a suspicion that most of the people who follow me closely on social media already knew, but decided that it was a good excuse to perhaps reach some of those friends from my days of yore. In that message, I came out as both bi and poly.

Responses were all positive, as I imagined they'd be, from "Love you, no matter what" to "What a great, honest and humble post!" But the greatest two responses were the ones in which two distant connections, a college classmate and a cousin of a past partner, essentially said, "Hey, me too!" This, I thought to myself, is one of the goals of this day, and one of the goals, I think, of coming out in general.

In my own experience, and I think in the experiences of a lot of people who are coming out as anything (lesbian, gay, trans*, bisexual, queer, asexual, intersex, genderqueer, polyamorous, kinky, etc.), coming out has more than one important function. I'll speak from my own experience because I can't (and shouldn't) speak from anyone else's; I came out for three reasons:

1. First and foremost, I came out to feel more like me. This is, in my view, the most important reason for someone to come out. Suddenly I didn't have to talk about half my life, didn't have to use euphemisms or code words, and didn't have to feel like I was being insincere with anyone about who I really was. I'll be at a pub night or something with Joel and he'll marvel at how fast I can work, "Oh yeah this is my boyfriend but we're not exclusive" into a conversation. Or, "Oh, you know, at the nonprofit I work with, the BISEXUAL Resource Center..." It's like if I'm clicking with someone, even on a casual friendship basis, I don't feel like it's genuine until they know who I am.
2. I came out to raise awareness. It doesn't always work out this way, of course, but sometimes the more personal connection people have with someone who isn't heteronormative or mononormative, the less likely it is that they will make blanket statements of discrimination. And the more likely it is they will find out more, and maybe even start to shed those small-minded ideas a little bit at a time.**
3. Finally, I came out to let others around me know it's okay if they want to come out too. I think this is one of the best parts about NCOD - the coming out domino effect. Those two people who commented that they, like me, were not straight or not monogamous (or both!) were probably already out, but they felt the need to come out again to me because I had come out to them, and all of us probably had these awesome "You are not alone" warm fuzzy moments because of it. 

I read a lot of amazing posts on Friday, some of them from friends who were coming out for the first time, some from straight, monogamous friends pledging their support to those who need it, and a lot (like me) saying, "I'm already out, but just in case you need a reminder...I'll tell you again." The community I feel on these days is really quite amazing, and the hope is that the more support and community we pledge to give to those who are still in the closet, the more they will finally feel they are able to come out when (and if) they want to. 

There are many, many hurdles to coming out, both personal and professional, and I'll admit that there are many family members who I'm still not out to. But the hope is that with days like NCOD, and with support from friends and acquaintances alike, those hurdles will be easier to cross in years to come for anyone who wants to jump them.

**Of course, your milage may vary. Last Christmas, as we were all discussing my second cousin's upcoming lesbian wedding, an extended family member actually said, "I guess it could happen to any family." I still have not come out to them, but that's a different subject for a different day. 

Reclaiming the Mix Tape

Like many children of the 80's, I have a particular nostalgia for the mix tape, especially the mix tape from a special someone. There was nothing quite like being handed that little rectangular case, pouring over the track names I knew and wondering about the ones I didn't know, and waiting painfully through the school day to go home and play it. And then, I hung on to every word and wondered, Why did he choose this one? This song uses "love" twenty times in it, is he trying to tell me something? (Spoiler: most of the time, he wasn't.) I'd reply in kind with my own mix tape that would show him my profoundly deep fifteen-year-old soul (though I'd never be there for the first listen, because who wants to see someone see your soul?)

Though I never stopped wanting to make mix tapes for special someones, something changed. It wasn't a disinterest in music - I still very much look to songs to qualify certain feelings. It wasn't the creation of digital media - I just started making playlists instead. And it wasn't that love songs have changed. It was my that my relationships no longer follow a preset societal norm, and love songs, most of the time, just aren't that poly.

But I was on a mission to make a mix, so I asked some other poly friends if they also had trouble with music. Several shared my frustrations, that otherwise meaningful songs become less so when overtly monogamous or jealous themes pop up. There's nothing quite like listening to a song and falling for it, thinking it says more than you could ever say to someone special, before realizing it contains a line like, "You're mine." I asked them, what do you do with that? How do you avoid mono-normativity* in mainstream music?

My favorite answer, other than the one recommending I just switch to dubstep, was this: I just ignore it. Though it had certainly crossed my mind to pick and choose what parts of songs I really intended to be about that special someone, there was always some voice in the back of my head going, That song is perfect except for those three lines, so it's ruined. Move on. But the more I thought about it the more I talked back to that voice: Why can't those three lines be re-interpreted? Who says I have to go along with what was it was supposed to be about? And then I got angrier: If I was one to always follow what was "supposed to be" I wouldn't be poly in the first place.

So I started to just ignore those lines that ruined a perfectly good song. Or, rather, re-imagined them. And why not? Why can't "You're mine" mean "You're mine right now," or "You're mine and you're also someone else's"? Music already squishes pages of emotion into three or so minutes, so isn't there always more complexity intended than what's on the page? And, even if that intent is totally different than the one we need, who's to say we can't change it? We're already pretty damned good at re-writing rules to fit our lives, why not re-write the intended meaning of mainstream music to fit our mixes?

Maybe this is my creative nature showing through, but once I started ignoring the mono-normativity, I found that making mixes was more fun - maybe even more fun than it was when I was fifteen. There's more of a challenge to finding a song that not only has those lines I can ignore but that also captures the desire for independence and community I have in my adult relationships. But once I find it, it's more rewarding. I mean, it's not quite as rewarding as writing out track lists by hand on a tiny rectangular cassette insert, but for some things, you just have to dig out a CD-R and a Sharpie.

I didn't use any of my friends' suggested poly-friendly songs in my latest mix, so I present their suggestions here, for amusement. What songs are on mine? Sorry, you don't get to see my soul that easily.

CSN&Y - "Our House"
Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band - "If I Should Fall Behind"
Todd Rundgren - "Hello It's Me"
Tim Minchin - "If I Didn't Have You" (to combat "one and only love forever" feelings)
fun - "Take Your Time"
Spice Girls - "Wannabe"
Alanis Morissette - "Doth I Protest Too Much"

and I'll add
The New Pornographers - "Challengers"
The Human League - "The Things that Dreams are Made Of"

Feel free to suggest your own in the comments!

*the monogamous "norm"

All Kinds of Time: Impatience and Immobility

Last week, I was hit with several large stacks of papers to grade, so many in fact that I worked through last weekend and most evenings of the week. I didn't cope very well with the pressure. I found myself anxious, jumpy, and wanting to cry at the weirdest moments. I couldn't focus. I wondered if I needed to ask my doctor about pharmaceutical assistance. The thought that Oh god there just isn't enough time rendered me almost useless for more hours than I care to admit. Last week sucked.

But I don't think I have an attention disorder. When I have one or two things on my plate, I can get them done, no problem. But when my daily to-do list expands into a weekly to-do list, my desire to get everything done right now makes it hard for me to figure out what to do first.

Saturday, while relaxing for the first time in a week and a half, I admitted that I have a problem with patience. I see things that I want to happen and for some reason expect them to happen today or tomorrow, and when they don't, or when I can't predict when they'll happen, I get anxious. I start to wonder if they'll happen at all. And in my anxiety, I am unable to work toward those things that I can actually make happen. (See: my novel-in-progress, a short story that's done and just needs to be submitted somewhere, the short fiction papers I should be grading right now.) I was posed with the question "What is your ideal for right now?" and by worrying about the future so much, I had difficulty answering.

As I sat down this morning to tackle everything on my daily to-do list, I heard a song by early 2000s band Fountains of Wayne (and it wasn't "Stacy's Mom," though that song does certainly have its merits). The song, "All Kinds of Time," is about an ultra-slow-mo moment between when a ball is snapped to a quarterback and when he throws it into the outstretched arms of a teammate. In that moment of chaos around him, everything stops: he looks around, imagines his family watching him on television, is at peace, and just like that, everything falls into place and he feels like he owns the world. 

I'm not a football fan by any stretch of the imagination, but I couldn't help but listen to it again and realize that in those moments of chaos when I'm working myself into an anxious frenzy of When will this happen or How will I ever get this done, I forget to step back and take stock. I forget to see that what I do have isn't worth ignoring for what I might have, and I forget to see that there are enough hours in the day, I just need to use them better. 

Patience isn't an easy virtue for anyone to learn, but I want to try harder because I feel like I've missed out on so many "own the world" moments. I feel like I haven't been able to separate the crushingly intimidating Future Goals from the totally obtainable Present Goals, and because of it have immobilized myself to opportunities. And mostly, I want to be able to answer the question "What is your ideal for right now?" so that I can attempt to make it a reality. Or, even better, realize that in a lot of ways, it already is my reality. 

My Big Fat Bisexual Pride Day

Today, September 23, is Celebrate Bisexuality Day. I posted about this on Facebook a few weeks ago and an old acquaintance commented, "They have to have a holiday for everything now, don't they?" My first instinct was to take him down in a brilliantly snarky, horribly piercing verbal battle, but then I took a step back, counted to ten, and instead replied, "This response is exactly why we need it."

I suppose one could question the "need" for celebrating something that's so obviously already celebrated during Pride. I mean, right? Can't you just so easily pick the bisexuals out of the amassed crowd? Isn't the parade just overwhelmed with bisexuals?

I'll give you a hint: it is. But you wouldn't know it by simply looking. Because so many doubt the existence of someone who can be attracted to more than one gender forever, it's easier for a lot of us to simply stay in one closet or another. Sometimes, we're already happily monogamously paired with a partner and therefore can blend into whatever community we appear to fit with. Sometimes, we are scared to come out because we're not positive we're bisexual because we've never had experience with more than one gender. Sometimes, it's just easier to ignore that others are erasing our existence and erase it for ourselves.

But we're out there. And we're not all just "confused," or "on the way to gay." We're not all more likely to cheat on our partners. We're not all poly (though, obviously, I'm not helping out with this stereotype). We're not all sex-crazed. We're not all experimenting. And today is the day out of the year that we try to remind others of these things, remind them of our existence, and remind them that even though we make up a significant portion of the LGBT population, simply celebrating pride with the greater community isn't enough.

Today, members of national LGBT organizations are holding a closed-door meeting at the White House to discuss the ongoing specific needs of the bisexual community. It is my hope that this meeting will not only allow activists from around the country to share ideas, but also spread awareness that we are a group to be supported, celebrated, and noticed. As for me, I will be wearing my bi pride colors today and will be happy to raise a toast to friends at the local celebration here in Boston on Friday. Thank you to all who already support our cause, and Happy Bi Pride!

If you would like to find out more about the Bisexual Resource Center and all that it does for the local and national bisexual community, visit our website. You can also support the BRC and all it does with support groups, literature, and education as the oldest nationally-focused bisexual organization in the U.S. 

Thoughts on the Word "Busy"

Last week, I decided I would try to eliminate the word "busy" from my vocabulary. This was spurred not only by my utter exhaustion of using the word (as repetition is the seed of boredom), but also because it's been the subject of several articles in my newsfeed the last few weeks. 

Laura Vanderkam of Fast Company challenges the notion that being busy equals being powerful, suggesting that "[a]nyone can be busy. It’s easy to fill your time if that’s your only goal. In our hectic world, the ultimate sign of success is empty space on your calendar." Carmel Lobello of The Week takes that idea a step farther, suggesting that "talking about how slammed you are can actually damage your ability to connect and interact with people." Finally, Meredith Fineman of the Harvard Business Review blog drove the last nails into the coffin of the B Word, in my mind, with this:

In addition to having entire conversations about how busy we are, we fail to share feelings with friends and family, ask about important matters, and realize that the “busy” is something that can be put on hold for a little while.

The last thing I want my job to do is keep me from having meaningful connections with people, and what's more, I think the more I tell people I'm busy the more I feel busy, and that leads to more stress and anxiety that I'm too busy. 

So I'm saying goodbye to the word "busy," and instead will explain that I am going to move my regular blog-posting day to Mondays instead of Fridays just because. 

Poly Communication, Part II: Managing Expectations

Though I've been poly for over four years, I still don't feel like I have a lot of poly "cred." I mean sure, I have a wonderful, stable relationship with my primary partner Joel (Boyfriend), and by witnessing chaos around us we're reminded we're pretty healthy, even if we don't have serious relationships talks on a regular basis. But because I was pretty comfortable in my relationship with him, and because grading a bazillion freshman writing papers takes up time and energy, I hadn't done a lot of outside dating.

Then a month ago, I started dating New Boy (or for simplicity's sake, Adam*), and my life abounded with new-relationship energy (or NRE, in poly-lingo). I know that it sounds like a non-problem, but as awesome as NRE is, it can be channeled into anxiety as well as happiness. There are a lot of reasons for this, I think - all those lovely things I talked about in my jealousy post, for some - but one of the biggest reasons for me was trying to manage expectations. And not just manage expectations, but manage realistic expectations for Adam specifically that weren't based on past experiences.

That's hard, because by definition, an expectation is a belief that something will happen in the future and is based on what's happened in the past. The last few people I had significant connections with before Adam (other than Joel) were temporary: when we started dating it was made clear that they were leaving town, and that our relationship time was running out. So accompanying the typical NRE I felt with Adam, I constantly had an anxiety that everything had to happen at once. It wasn't until I could tell him about this anxiety that it started to subside, especially when he reminded me that he wasn't going anywhere.

Now I've realized that part of managing expectations is realizing why I might have certain expectations that I do, and deciding whether they're realistic for someone new. Like most things in poly, this means talking early and talking often. It sometimes feels like wandering into an emotional minefield to have a conversation about where things are going and what each person wants (and frankly, can handle) in a relationship. There's nothing quite more exposing than putting your heart out there with the possibility for rejection; it really makes me want to go back to the toss-a-note-and-run methods of our youth (Do you want to be my boyfriend? ...a casual sex thing? ...just friends? ...blissfully unlabeled because The Man can't tell us what to do? Check one).

But even beyond those big, scary questions, trying to manage even the smallest expectations have made a big difference. Asking questions like, "Will you be able to chat later tonight?" can be just as important as "Where do I fit into your life?" As simple as that sounds, I think there are so many "rules" to dating that we forget we can just ask. ("He hasn't answered your IM in a few hours? He's playing hard to get. Turn the tables and don't answer him for a few hours." Or, you know, maybe he's in a meeting. Maybe he's cooking dinner. Maybe he has a date. Maybe you should chill out.)

A friend of mine has a tattoo across his chest that says, "I'm not afraid to ask." I feel like an entire world opened up to me when I realized that instead of wondering things like, "Does he like me?" "What are we?" "Should I send that extra IM tonight or will I be imposing?", I could just ask. And not only could I ask, but things would actually get better (even if it's only in the long run), if I did so instead of remaining silent. There are many hurdles to getting over silence - I'm not saying it's easy, even just to toss that note and run away - but it's freeing to know that it's actually an option.

The more expectations we can manage by asking, the fewer times un-met expectations cause positive NRE to be channeled into anxiety (or, on the flip side, the fewer times we drag out something that is really not what we want in the first place). We poly people throw far more notes at our crushes than the monogamously inclined, so it's important for the potential benefits to outweigh the potential rejection. Does he/she like me? There's no way to know for sure except getting out the sparkly gel pens and practicing our football-note folding skills.

*We've decided not to change names to protect the innocent, because neither of them are really very innocent. 

Bruised Apples

Sometime in the mid-90s, I taught myself to juggle. A lot of people would have thought, let's watch someone else juggle first. Let's rent a VHS tape. Let's buy one of those trendy Klutz books about juggling. But not me. Did I start out with silk scarves that fall slowly? Hell no. I started with tennis balls, and compensated for not having enough time to throw one before catching the next one by throwing them ten to fifteen feet in the air. It was months before I figured out technique and was able to juggle indoors.

But I never could get past juggling three. At some point, I got too frustrated to go back and learn another way, so I polished what I knew (and know to this day, to the sadness of all round fruit that passes through my kitchen).

When navigating poly, I should have thought about my past juggling limitations when deciding how much dating I could handle at one time. There was a month-long period back in 2009 when I regularly saw three different guys. This might have been okay if I felt the same level of casual connection with all of them, but there were two I felt quite fond of (one of whom was Boyfriend), so my dates with the third started to fill me with more guilt than joy. My mind was off with one of the other two while physically with the third, and that was when I realized I might not be as good at juggling as I thought.

For a long time after that, after it was down to just Boyfriend, I didn't date very many other people. I was trying to get my career going and became more involved in organizations. I went through a brief period after I came out as bisexual when I wanted all the ladies, but even that, after a while, calmed down to a quiet, "I'd like a lady, if she happens to come by."

But now, life has thrown me more tennis balls, and I'm trying to juggle again. Only this time, I know what it feels like when I'm taking on too much. I'm already feeling like I've reverted back to tossing them fifteen feet in the air. I like expanding my life to new people, but I need to be realistic, so I have two choices: lay down some juggling implements or start over and learn how to juggle properly. 

To get away from the metaphor for a second (and I know, I'm quite attached to it at this point), practicing polyamory requires the ability to manage time. If Rule One is Communication, Rule Two is Time Management. But even beyond scheduling, I feel lousy when I don't think I'm giving my attention fairly to someone. When New Boy suggested I write about juggling new partners and time management, he said the first thing should be, "Don't drop them on their heads." Of course he was trying* to be funny, but he was right. 

So what do I do? The solution depends on the situation of course, but the first thing I've learned to do is be honest. That conversation sucks, especially if you're talking to someone who you like and who likes you back. Letting that someone know you might not have as much time or as much attention to give them is hard. But what sucks worse is not saying anything and fading away over time, possibly leaving the other person wondering what they did wrong. I still might eventually realize that I can't give that person the attention they deserve, but at least I didn't drop them on their head.

I should also probably learn to juggle properly, to be honest. I should look at past experiences and realize how much I should attempt to take on in the first place. I should factor in the mountains of grading, the volunteering, the writing, and the social engagements, and more than anything else be realistic, so instead of having to limit the tennis balls, I don't pick up as many in the first place. The ideal results are less hurt feelings, fewer bruised apples, and more sanity, the last of which I need most of all.

Oh, and if anyone has one of those old Klutz juggling books laying around, I wouldn't mind reading up a bit this time.

*Okay who am I kidding, it was funny. I like funny. Funny is sexy.