Bridges, Baby...Bridges

I have always been a lover of words.  Usually, the written word, both with my reading them and my writing them.  But as I’ve gotten older and more stable in who I am as a person, as a soul, I’ve been becoming more confident in the spoken word as well. 

I’ve historically never been one to communicate my feelings well to others because I’ve gotten shot down in my early years, so I learned to protect my feelings and keep them well under guard.  My mother used to draw me out when she saw something was wrong with me, like coaxing a bird out of a tree, slowly and with much patience.  Which is ironic, because she was one of the people I hid my feelings from—when she got angry, she could verbally destroy anything in her path, out of the pent-up frustration she was letting loose.  But when she was calm, she was gentle, and she showed me that I could trust her.   Thank the ’verse for that. 

My sister has also been instrumental in teaching me how to communicate.  We used to have conversations about honesty, in which she would say that you have nothing to lose by being honest, and everything to gain.  She did that with her boyfriends, her co-workers, her friends, everyone.  If you have a problem, let people know where you stand, because otherwise, they never will know, and they’ll keep doing what they’re doing, unaware.  And they’ll never know how you feel, which causes rifts and distance between you.  I remember using that advice for the first time with a problem with a co-worker, and it worked out well—turns out I was imagining that he had a problem with me, had his own shit going on that had nothing to do with me, and after that, we were fine.  I thank the ’verse for my sister’s influence, as well.

There were times in my life when being honest had no effect whatsoever.  There are people for whom words do not move mountains at all.  They are encased in their pain as if in amber and they will neither let you in nor work their way out of it.  That’s all there is to the story.  It was at those times that I withdrew once again, behind a wall of stone, because it was too painful to make myself vulnerable and not be heard, not be accepted.  I’ve gone to therapy to deal with the enormity of that, and I’ve come out on the other side.   

Since I’ve been identifying as poly and living the life (five years now), I’ve been learning to be comfortable with letting myself be so vulnerable, with putting how I feel on the table, warts and ugly hairs and all.  And with the people I am in relationship with, I am FINALLY heard, listened to, and accepted.  We all have the desire to lift each other up, and so we are open to understanding one another.  Being supported like this LETS us safely deal with our own underlying shit that causes the feelings.  When we’re not being supported, or, even worse, being dragged down to someone else’s level of comfort, we don’t get the opportunity to get down to the bottom of things, because we’re too busy propping ourselves back up and treating our open wounds.  When we have support, we don’t have to do emotional triage on ourselves. That means we can take things apart and examine what is making those little volcanos erupt.  Once we know that, we can talk to ourselves and listen to ourselves and often, after a series of conversations, we come out reassured and the thing is not a problem anymore.   It could come back, though, and then the process starts again, until we have truly put the thing down for good.  

I've had friends come to me with problems dealing with mates, family members, and other people in their lives.  Since I've been poly, now I say, have you told them how you feel? Often, it's no. And then I ask, why don't you sit down with them and tell them how you are feeling and see if you can come to an understanding, to try to make this better? More often than not, they'll shake their heads and say, no, they would never be able to do that, they’d just say this and this, that would never work. And I can't help but realize that, in my head, poly communication often extends to more than just my polycule--I bring it to all the relationships I have, and suggest that others to do the same. And I'm finding that not everyone believes that communication is effective because of experience that what they've said has fallen on deaf ears and closed hearts. Not everyone can summon the courage to open their hearts because they know the result can be negative or dangerous or just have no effect whatsoever.  Not everyone feels lifted up, but often dragged down by people they love, who are in immense pain.  And only they can heal that pain, and that, sadly, doesn’t always happen. 

But despite all of that, I'm still going to keep suggesting communication with people you love and want to keep in your life, because dammit, you never know what bridges can be built with words.  Bridges aren’t built in a single day—sometimes it can take years.  And you can’t invest all of you in the outcome, because it has a chance of not holding.  It always has a chance of not holding, in which case, you’ll want to call it a day.  But it equally has a chance of holding strong.  You just believe in it and keep building.  And one day, you might see someone familiar at the other end of it, walking towards you, waving.