an excerpt
Relief is exactly the right word-my chosen family, and especially my constellation of intimates, is my harbour in the world. Some days I really need one. But it’s not just an end-of-the-day sense of relief, the kind where after the travails of a workday you get to finally take your shoes off and put your feet up and have a short measure of something nice and an episode of The West Wing. That’s a nice thing; it’s a daily pleasure and over time the daily taste of it contributes to a much longer wellness. But this isn’t just that. This kind of relief is also a relief from a lifetime of solitude and doubt. Every phone call and email tells me that all the dire predictions made about my ability to ever make friends or coax anyone into loving me were unfounded. (I already knew they were unkind.) The ways in which the people with whom I have planted and grown great intimacy, whether while naked or dressed or both, make a lie out of the pervasive myth that people like me-fat or queer or trans or unrepentantly nerdy or polyamorous or difficult or some of those things or all of them-that people like me (and maybe like you too) don’t get to have families. Not wonderful families, not families full of warmth and heat and light and the clean fresh air of love that lives in the truth. They shame us and scare us; they try to make us normalize ourselves with the threat of loneliness. We resist it so long that then when we can lay down our arms, sometimes we just need to cuddle up and cry for a while (or, at intervals, forever), and having a way to do that is as much a pleasure as the first moment a painful injury finally doesn’t hurt anymore-the relief radiates like the sun.
There’s another kind of relief worth mentioning here: the relief of having such an important thing named and recognized so well. When Ishai asked me about my constellation of intimates, I also felt the relief of not having to start at zero and explain everything I value and cherish in the world of relationships. It was a shibboleth; I knew immediately that despite the fact he’d offered me something called a vegan Reuben sandwich, we were nevertheless together in a profound way on some of the most important issues in my universe. I walked through the door he held open for me that afternoon, at that wobbly little café table, and into a whole new wonderful life.
This entry was originally posted at http://sbearbergman.dreamwidth.org/27492.html.
There’s another kind of relief worth mentioning here: the relief of having such an important thing named and recognized so well. When Ishai asked me about my constellation of intimates, I also felt the relief of not having to start at zero and explain everything I value and cherish in the world of relationships. It was a shibboleth; I knew immediately that despite the fact he’d offered me something called a vegan Reuben sandwich, we were nevertheless together in a profound way on some of the most important issues in my universe. I walked through the door he held open for me that afternoon, at that wobbly little café table, and into a whole new wonderful life.
This entry was originally posted at http://sbearbergman.dreamwidth.org/27492.html.