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.

Five Years Ago

Five years ago today, my friend Kristi and I set out from my parents' condo in Ohio with a packed 2001 Volkswagen Beetle. We were destined for Boston with a stopover in Niagara Falls, both on our own journeys: Kristi, to Canada and Boston for the first time; me, to a semester-long internship in Cambridge. 

I told everyone that this trip was an opportunity for me to get experience and make connections in the publishing world. I told them that I needed my own adventure before coming back and settling down. I told them this would be temporary. I told myself it would be temporary. But I lied. 

When I had left Michigan a few days earlier, I left that life: a husband, two dogs, and a person who I barely recognize now as me.

It wasn't a bad life. On the surface, I had a lot to envy. The economy was bad but we were doing okay, Tom having just started his emergency medicine residency and me working part-time at a bookstore. We had friends. We had a new house.

What I didn't have was a sense of self. I was just starting to figure out what I wanted to do after years of unsettled decisions: the recommendation letters my undergrad professors had written to apply to an MA program in literature went unsent, and the LSAT registration fee I paid, refunded. Twice. I had finally decided to continue my studies in creative writing, something that had always brought me joy. But instead of making me feel more settled as myself in the life I already had, it made me more anxious to get out. This internship was the perfect opportunity to see what it was like on my own, and if I didn't like it, I could always come back.

At first, Kristi and I had a great time being tourists. We wandered the crowded sites of Niagara, we rode the Maid of the Mist, and we sang embarrassingly loud songs as we drove on to Massachusetts. When we got to Newton, where I was renting a room for the semester, we unpacked my Beetle into the first place I would ever live completely on my own. We rode the commuter rail into Boston, ate at Fanueil Hall, and wandered the Public Garden. I TA'd my first course at school. We ate Indian food and drank Guinness in pubs. I knew the city was already affecting me in a way that would make moving back to the middle of nowhere, something my ex-husband and I had always agreed upon, nearly impossible.

When Kristi left a few days later, I came back from dropping her off at the airport and took a look around my rented room, a strange mixture of freedom and loss filling my chest. I started realizing what it meant to be me, totally alone. I was there less than two months before I admitted to myself, and then to my ex, that I wasn't going back.

The next few months were hard. I missed the stability, my friends, the dogs. I learned how to manage my own finances, something I'd never done before. I learned how to cook for one and eat at my desk every night. I learned what it really meant to be lonely. I learned how to live by myself. But I also learned how to live as myself.

On October 13, 2008, I wrote:

I hope I never regret any of the changes I make to my life. I hope that throughout it all, I can still look back and see that I became happier, or wiser, after it all. But it is the nature of change to blind you to all but hindsight. And I cannot say how any of it will turn out.

Me in 2008 would have never guessed that by this time, I'd be employed doing something that I love, that I'd have so many amazing friends in my life, or even that I'd be dating not one but multiple people who care about me. But I was right about having become happier and wiser. If I could time-travel, I'd have to try really hard not to tell past me what mistakes to avoid. But I would definitely tell her it would be all worth it to make them anyway.

All of the Above

There are a few things I'm positive I know about myself: I will never be five feet tall without shoes I refuse to wear because they're uncomfortable, I will always be right-handed despite that week in sixth grade I tried to switch, and I will never settle for either/or. In most areas of my life, I will choose letter D. All of the Above. And I've come to realize this is not a defect, but a feature.

A few months ago, I wrote an article for a local bi newsletter called "Now What?" The focus of the article was to talk about what I did once I realized I was bisexual, and to explain, I discussed my history of poor follow-through. I chalked up the year and a half it took me to realize I wasn't straight to thinking it was perhaps something else that was fleeting, like my half-finished short stories or half-eaten bags of frozen vegetables. 

I thought of my poor follow-through as me being unable to finish something, but now I don't think it's that at all. I think it's me being unable to resist starting something, because in reality, I want to do everything.


And just like my desire to do everything, which sometimes means I don't finish everything, I've always wanted to be everything. Growing up, I played softball, volleyball, the piano; I wrote, sang, drew, and painted. One of the hardest decisions of my childhood happened in seventh grade when they made me choose between visual arts, choir, and band. The answer to the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" changed from veterinarian to comedian to gym teacher to police officer to coffee shop owner to high school speech coach, then finally to writer. I didn't want to be one of those, I wanted to be all of them. I wanted to dabble.

But "dabbling" sounds so negative. It sounds like, "Hey you, why are you farting around? Pick something and go for it." But I don't want to pick something. Just like I don't want to pick one gender I'm attracted to, or one person to be with forever, I don't want to spend the rest of my life doing just one thing.

We spend so much time worrying about what we're going to be, which can be overwhelming for someone like me who doesn't want to choose. We think about the issues of stability versus variety, but in all honesty those things don't have to be mutually exclusive. I get asked all the time, "When are you going to get that full-time teaching position?" and I answer as expected: "Whenever I can publish a book. Whenever I have more experience. Whenever I start applying for one." When really, I want to say, "Maybe never. Maybe I don't want one."

I like being an adjunct professor: I can (mostly) pick and choose the classes I teach, how many I teach, and am flexible with the rest of my time. If I want to try and get a part-time job doing something else in addition, I can. If I want to save up money over the school year and do little-to-nothing for three months of the summer, I can. If I want to spend entire days switching back and forth between blogging, writing fiction, painting monsters, and grading, I can.

I used to feel insecure about how, as a person with writing degrees, I wasn't an expert at anything. But now I realize I can be knowledgeable in a little bit of everything, which, I think, makes me better equipped at teaching brand-new college students who might be a little lost themselves. It definitely gives me the power to say, "You don't know what you want to be when you grow up? Good! What do you want to be right now?"

There may be a time when I focus a bit more on one thing professionally, but I am almost positive I will never stop leaving the last few pages of my journals blank, hone in on one artistic pursuit, or resist opening that new box of cereal before the last one is finished. What I need to do right now, however, is stop listening to that pesky voice that keeps asking, "When are you going to be a professional something? When are you going to be more secure?"

"I'm a professional everything," I'll say to it, "I'm All of the Above. And there's nothing more secure in knowing what you are."