nyyki

This part of April is always a tough slog for me. A friend I thought of as my sister and who I loved very much passed several years ago, but she’s still in my memory. Several other things have happened in the first two weeks of April too, ranging from the high point of getting a functional kidney on April 13 to the low of fourteen years ago, when my last romantic relationship was ripped from my heart and mind and crushed. I’ve always had bouts of suicidal ideation, to use the modern buzzword for it (note how like so much else these days it’s a step removed from feeling – suicidal ideation instead of suicidal – it’s typical of the disengaged way things are spoken of nowadays), but that was the closest I came to doing it. I’ve always had a feeling that I would be the one to take myself out of the picture, but that got to the bleeding edge back then.

Losing

amy”pippi”Boyd was another blow to the system, and it’s been sort of touchy in the intervening time.

A couple of things, and I know some of this is rehash to get some others on the same page, so if it’s old news or an old argument please don’t repeat your side of it here, because my feelings haven’t changed on this. I spend many days feeling romantically unlovable. As far as I know there is nobody wondering what kissing me would be like, or even holding my hand. This is because romantic expressions toward me dried up on April 8, 2011. That’s a decent stretch – I’ve seen relationships come together, bond, then break apart in that much time, and if my forced romantic isolation was a person that child would be entering high school in the fall. And since I don’t gain any emotional benefit from hope, because I prefer to deal with the now instead of expending mental and emotional capital on what may or may not happen in the future, This is the way it is right now and no amount of magical thinking will change the here and now. But it does cause me to wonder about how much consequence I am in general (no, not for specific people, but the wider community) and if that will ever change.

This is where some people will say something like, “You have to be your own agent of change”, but at this point the answers and strategies for the change that would help me are beyond what I can fathom. The simple fact is that online dating sites may work for some people, but they don’t often work for blind people because of accessibility issues, and those companies don’t have to comply with the ADA because they’re classified as entertainment – yeah, one of Maslow’s hierarchical needs is entertainment according to these firms. Also, each time outside of the house is a huge risk, because to keep my transplanted kidney happy I take anti-rejection meds, or to put in more recognizable terms I’m immunosuppressed. This is way real to me – that immunosuppression came very close to killing me during the spring and early summer of 2023, because I got infected with a pair of fungus infections a normal immune system can kick out of the pool with little effort. So that leaves me with recommendations from friends, or someone I know trying to hook me up with someone they think would be compatible with my particular personality and situation. But the great unsocializing has made those kinds of things far more difficult – attempts have been made, or at least one attempt, but for multiple reasons that fizzled.

In general I’m not an emotionally demonstrative person for part of that range of expression – I don’t get enraged or wrathful in loud ways, though my former roommate, who has a high amount of empathy, says when I’m angry or upset about something she could feel it and it made her want to run from the house, and crying is very difficult for me – it’s like there’s a wall around sadness for me, and it’s constrained within it, so letting it out requires extreme sadness or a long slow overflow of the walls. That means when I get sad it can stick around until it reaches a critical level and overflows, which it’s rare for it to do, so it often takes willful action to alter my mood. Chalk that up to another place where I’m nonfunctional in some way. Note that I don’t think of this as all that unusual, everyone’s nonfunctional in some ways, because we’re not assembled to exacting specifications.

I believe that alone is one thing and lonely is a way different level – alone is a condition, not a state of being and emotion, so someone can be alone and be fine with it. Lonely has that emotional component mixed in by definition, so it’s not going to manifest as gladness – can any of you think of a situation where being lonely is a happy thing or even a satisfied one? How about a situation where loneliness isn’t toxic? Then there’s the third level, being a loner. At that point the loneliness has gone metastatic, but there are people who can find happiness or satisfaction in being so. I don’t take any positive feelings out of being lonely, never have, but I’ve been fine with being alone.

One thing about being alone though – touch deprivation sort of goes with the territory. Other than my dad’s parents my family wasn’t much into physical contact, so this has been my life – I don’t want it to be. But I also don’t want to go through life alone either, and life bears no guarantees.

I like to think I’m a better person than I was back then, and that I’ve been a positive impact on others’ lives. But I don’t know how to measure that, and since it’s a subjective thing there may not be a way to measure it. Besides, is there value in putting a measurement on that anyway? I don’t know.

All this to say, I give up – they win, my ex wins (though I suspect my ex would not like that that breakup was the end of a feature in my life), and I’m throwing in the towel. Poly folks kind of mystify me, because, how does someone find one partner, much less more than one? It’s clear that I don’t know how.

Don’t worry, I’m not so down about this that I’m at risk. One of the most annoying things about losing my sight is that everyone is now abstracted a level. The eyes are in many ways a direct extension from the visual cortex, with thousands of connections hardwired directly into the brain, as is common among predator biology, so turning that off is a huge change. And there are so many elements relating to eyesight that evolved in how we interact as humans that I can no longer participate in. This includes the pre-conscious attraction signaling, so before someone is aware they’re potentially interested in someone else an exchange happens between them to determine if that interaction is worth getting conscious minds aware of it. Of course a blind person or someone visually impaired can miss that first blush of attraction, the part of it they don’t know about yet. I think this may have something to do with why I’ve been alone for so long. Other factors also may be at play that I’m not aware of.

All in all, I think I’ve grown and developed in the fourteen years I’ve been overlooked. That doesn’t mean it hasn’t also done some damage and left some marks. And every day is another dot in a chain of them, and I try to keep in mind that anything’s possible in a constantly changing universe. But an extrovert in isolation is a hard place to live in.