Anger, emotional pacing, and Captain Jane at sea

Yesterday was a bit of an angry, tumultuous day.  For a brief few hours, I worried that I'd slipped back into some form of depression/anxiety, but in reality, I think it was just the way I needed to process some feelings, and the way it happened was kind of like a storm at sea.

Let me unpack...

For various reasons, which I won't get into, it's become sort of apparent that my excitement/enthusiasm for polyamory is perhaps maybe sort of outpacing Fiance's comfort with what (and who) I am interested in.  And this is okay! It's okay for him to not be ready. This is all completely normal. And I understand and respect that he needs to process things and work on his own feelings at his own pace. He reminds me every time we talk that he "wants to say yes", and one of the reasons he can't just say yes before he's ready is that he doesn't want to discover he's really not okay and ask me to put the brakes on things after he's given the green light.  It makes perfect and total sense, and I love him for the thought and seriousness he's  putting into all of this and how open he is to not only considering it, but also his willingness to try and actively work to change how he feels about this so that he can get to a point where he can freely and happily give me something I really want.

That said, my feelings for my crush lately have gone from "pleasant hum" to "roaring firehose of emotion". I came out to his wife recently, which was an amazing and positive experience, and I think made us closer friends, but partly because of how unexpected it was that she did not ask us to give up on our crush, I let myself (and my feelings) dial themselves up way past eleven. Way further than I should have, considering the two people who sort of hold the starter guns still have them buried in their pockets (and one of them only just recently learned she had one).

So yesterday was a reality check. Fiance and I talked. And I cried over a wonky comedy-of-errors misunderstanding that ended up being totally hilarious and harmless, but drained the everliving fuck out of my emotions. In the end, I got a better and stronger sense of just how much slower I need to be moving emotionally for this all to remain sane.  And I also got the real sense that I needed to do something now in order to well... calm the fuck down, so to speak.  So, I decided to try and take a break. Crush and I agreed to go no-contact (I slipped once...more on that later), and I put all the things (literally and metaphorically) that make me think of him in a little box out of sight.  And then I tried to dive into my work, and chores, and all the things I've been neglecting. I skipped going in to work so I could take the day to process and get my feet under me again.

But... unfortunately (or maybe this is normal? I don't know), I didn't feel relieved at all. I expected and needed and wanted to feel like a burden had been lifted. That this internal pressure had been set aside (if not released) and I could get back into a headspace where I could dial shit down, calm my tits, and go back to where I was just a few days ago. And.. to be fair, I think I succeeded. There were long swaths of time where I didn't think about him. And my feelings dialed down, and on some levels, this was a successful experiment.

But on other levels, it really wasn't. Some emotions dialed down, but others got dialed way up... I got anxious for reasons I don't fully understand... maybe because I'm behind on my work... but more likely it was because I felt like I was cutting myself off from a good friend who I'd normally go to talk about my inner life.  Looking back at it now, I think it really was because I didn't have (or felt like I didn't have) anyone to talk to about what was going on in my head. And that was miserable.

I started doing a lot of chores.  And, I got angry, mostly at myself for reasons I didn't understand then (I thought I was failing at dialing down the crush feelings).  I was pretty emotionally raw all day, Fiance supported the fuck out of me though, and gave me deep and long fantastic hugs whenever I needed them (which averaged once every oh... 10-15 minutes), and let me be angry with the world without taking it personally....

Except once, when I did direct my anger directly at him (sorry sweetie) because of something he said, or rather, something I heard when he said something else... this actually is relevant to my attempts to process things so here's a bit of a tangent....

While I was deep in "angry at myself" mode, I was still busy actively trying hard to figure out ways to snap out of it. Feel better again. Have a catharsis.  And so my thoughts turned to kink. And I started planning. I started building a scene in my head that I thought would really help me feel better. And I wanted it. I wanted to go deep sub. Really deep. Let everything go. Relinquish all control and put my complete and absolute trust in my sweetie so that I could reconnect with both him, and a much more calm and open version of myself. I wanted it to include punishment, and restraint, and sensory deprivation. I wanted a collar and a leash (I found a tie), and I wanted to be told how bad I'd been and how guilty I should feel, and how the only way to redeem myself would be to do exactly as he said. I wrote down real safewords (up until now we've been using the "we mean what we say, especially when we say it three times" method in our super mild novice-kink games).   I started laying out the ropes, the shoes, the toys, the blindfold...

And then I came to him and started to describe some of what I wanted (and in my mind needed) that night... and in response where I expected him to be enthusiastic about it, the way he had been enthusiastic whenever I'd come to him asking for hugs, instead he said something about how I should make sure the laundry was done first... and because chores are a topic of endless arguments between us, and my emotionally raw state, it triggered a storm inside me that I had no control over. When he said this as a simple logistical comment (we need a cleared off bed for kink), I heard it as an instruction/direction that I should "finish your chores before you play" ....  And I just lost it inside. I broke. I closed up. I shut down. In my head, I threw a screaming raging temper tantrum and punched a wall. Wind and rain and huge boulders of destruction were flying everywhere.  Outside, I don't know what I did or what I looked like. I probably just walked away and continued to fold clothes, letting things bubble up as my anger built up... I don't think I raised my voice until much later, after I'd already broken down and IMed my crush (breaking my own "no contact today" rules) to let out some of what I was feeling (looking back, this is the moment when I should have realized that some of my anger wasn't anything to do with the crush feelings. It had everything to do with feeling like I couldn't talk to my friend).

But Fiance and I got past that moment. Talked about it. I apologized. I think he did too. And so we started working towards kink, which was fun, and interesting, and started WAY earlier in the evening than I expected! (I was expecting to start after raid... but we kind of started during raid, during breaks, and between pulls... At one point, I was raiding in a thong and a tie and cat ears, exchanging dirty PMs between pulls, and following orders to make sure I was in clear view of him, and looking at porn whenever I wasn't DPSing... *swoon*) Our games did not end up including all the things on my wishlist (no punishment play), which is okay because I don't know if that kind of catharsis would have happened for me anyway.  But we pushed boundaries, and discovered new things (like how fun it is being blindfolded and half naked and led by a tie around the house. And how HOLY SHIT I do NOT like mirrors involved in my kink! Nope-noped the fuck away from that!) Hopefully I'll find time to write more about the specifics of what we learned later as I continue to discover new things about my strange and ever-changing "switchy" brain (I wonder if my synaesthesia has anything to do with how my brain seems to refuse to settle into a favorite role...)

I woke up this morning feeling SO much better. Something got processed yesterday, whether it was during our kink play, or the long deep sleep afterwards, or maybe even in the moments this morning when I got up to make coffee. I feel better. Calmer. My feet are much closer to being under me. I see clear skies and calm waters. I took all the things that make me think of my crush back out from their box and felt the familiar pleasant hum.

All of this though adds up to... I don't know... half a dozen things. But the thing I wanted this post to add up to was how processing emotions is hard as fuck. Especially for me sometimes. My inner life is volatile and made of things that I don't really fully understand until later when I've had time to reflect. There are sea monsters and huge waves, and sometimes these wide magical stretches of depth and clarity that deceive me into thinking that navigating this ocean is easy.  It's not. But my ship has not yet sunk, and I'm still my own captain... Captain Jane.... haha. That makes me giggle so much that I need to put that in the title of this post. (I've been searching for a domme honorific for a while... maybe Captain Jane might work...? Dunno.)

The other thing that I'm coming away from yesterday understanding is that once I have them, I do not do well when cut off from friends. Even if it's self-exile. I felt a little bit like this was a useful experiment or dress-rehearsal for the someday-what-if scenario if/when the Fiance tells me he definitely is not comfortable with me and Crush being together. If that day comes, I think I know better now than to try and deal with my feelings through going "no contact" with him. That was a dumb idea yesterday, and will continue to be a dumb idea for as long as he's my friend.