"dirty little birds with dirty little claws"

 Not my most coherent post, but I'd prefer to hit post then try to make it make more sense.  Let's just pretend stream of consciousness actually works for a journal entry.

I ran across a quote today that stopped me dead in my tracks.   I've run across it before but whatever sort of misguided mercy I practice on myself made me just shunt it aside.  

 

"You will be too much for some people. Those are not your people." 

 

Is everyone guaranteed people?  I know no one is guaranteed anything, it's not a real question.  But I wonder about who my people might be, because I'm pretty sure I'm too much all the time in all directions, wanting more intimacy and more information and more reassurance than anyone could possibly give, no matter how much I try to distribute the caretaking of me.

 

I think I've talked about this before, but once upon a time Abundance asked me why I could be fine with having multiple partners but still be anxious about my other partners having multiple partners and I stumbled through this (erroneous) explanation.

 

Say it takes 11 units of attention for the world to deal with me and for me to not spiral out of control.  (yes, I know that's a meaningless sentence, the world doesn't have a single agenda and it's no one's job but mine to not spiral out of control, but assume that the thesis is true for the sake of the following argument/neurosis).  If I can distribute that across a wide enough network, no one will get sick of me and my neediness and I can find a stable place.   If each of my partners can provide me with 2 units of attention and I can distribute the other 5 across non-partner friendships and the like, I can keep everything moving forward.  But if any one partner takes some of that attention away from me in order to give it to another person, the system collapses.

 

I know, it's not a zero sum game.  And I contain multitudes of agendas and contradictions and some of my poly practices are healthy, or at least I think they are.

 

And so, it's not exactly that I'm doing anyone a favor by trying to make sure no one person has to deal with the unadulterated unmitigated stream of insecurity that is my brain, but kind of.  And this is hard to talk about, and I know so much of my struggles with how poly works is because my parents taught me time is love.

 

There's a concrete junkies song (I have referred to the concrete junkies as music to kill yourself too for years and years) called Crescent moon that had an outsize impact on young omnia's psyche during her college years.  "I know I'm not part of the life you had planned."  It's in my bones and it tells me shitty stories about how I'm no one's first choice.  Not that I'm practicing solo poly, or am only ever anyone's secondary, but that I missed out on that formative experience of being anyone's first wife, of being anyone's childhood sweetheart.  I was writing a different story at the time that would have happened. 

 

I like my lovers like I like my coffee.  Lukewarm and bitter.  But I quit drinking coffee so many years ago.  (and of all the things I've discarded along the way, I miss coffee the least).