Two Years Of Pining

In August of 2020, my boyfriend broke up with me.

It was weird. I was moving. I ended up sitting naked in the bathtub, a pipe in my hand that I was crying too hard to suck on, utterly overwhelmed with grief and confusion. This break-up did not fit with the scripts I had derived from previous ones – I couldn’t feel angry even when I tried. Every reason he gave me for breaking up with me made sense and left little room for self-blame. I ended up telling him, through tears, that I was proud of him for putting himself first, and I meant it. It wasn’t lost on either of us that I’d helped him build the skill of putting himself first to start with, but I couldn’t resent myself for that, either. I had so much emotion and so few places to put it.

It took me a long time to go back to being Friends with him, which is what he’d said he wanted. He was terrified of losing our friendship, and so was I, but I waited.

Some of it was simply to let the raw feelings peak and subside, so that I didn’t cry all over him the first time that we hung out. Most of the delay, though, was caused by a bitter argument I was having with myself about how to be his friend.

There was a part of me that believed in my ability to “win him back”, and I did not want to give that part of me the reins. Consciously, in my Logic Brain, I’ve never believed in “winning” or “deserving” people, and I wasn’t about to start here, with a person who had done so much hard work on self-determination and holding his own boundaries. Less consciously, though, my brain was churning out ideas for grand romantic gestures and irresistibly hot outfits, ways to make him jealous and ways I could make myself irreplaceable. I kept my distance until I could be sure that I was rejoining his life as his friend, and not as his jilted ex seeking to manipulate him.

The waiting hurt, though.

We eased back into each other’s lives with all the grace of a reversing dump truck. Things were tentative and awkward, in some ways, and in other ways it felt like I had never been gone. There was still stuff of mine at his house – even after he moved. The in-jokes still cracked us both up. And for every cruel moment wherein it felt like nothing had changed, I paid for in pain when I remembered: we’re just friends.

He had surgery, and I didn’t Google the procedure. I couldn’t bring myself to. But I brought myself to his house. He couldn’t blow up his airbed, he said, because of the surgery, and I was welcome to sleep in his bed with him anyhow. I spent hours awake next to him, barely hanging onto the edge of the mattress, listening to him breathing. I thought and thought about the pain I was in, and whether I would ever deem it to have been worthwhile. The thought of losing his friendship was devastating, but spending time with him was torture. Would it ever hurt less? Did I want it to hurt less, or did I feel like the pain at least kept some part of our romantic love preserved? Was I a better friend for being here, even though it hurt? Would I have ever, in any universe, decided not to go and see him after surgery? Was I imagining his regret and grief and poorly-concealed feelings for me? Questions chased each other around my skull as YouTube autoplayed hits from artists I never usually listened to. When Ed Sheeran’s Perfect came on, I almost turned the TV off, but the background noise was helping my platonic friendo sleep next to me, so I suffered and I suffered.

(Later, my fiancee would hear this story, and point out that surgery shouldn’t have affected my ex’s ability to blow up his airbed, because his airbed came with a pump that plugged into the mains and blew the fucker up for you.)

Most of the time, I respected his decision, and I made myself content with his friendship. Unfortunately, Drunk Morgan did not always get this memo.

This paragraph exists largely to thank my other partner in Stoke, my fiancee and my mother, all of whom dealt with a number of my wobbles with patience and compassion. Drunk Morgan swung wildly between “I have to win him back,” and “I have to ghost him,” neither of which were what Sober Morgan wanted. I would sob to anyone but him about how badly I wanted him back, and respond to every gentle suggestion that I tell him that with more wailing about how he wouldn’t and shouldn’t take me back. Things that I was able to repress when sober felt like they might crush me when I drank, especially around him.

This is not to say that Sober Morgan was perfect, either, just a little calmer – but equally as stubborn. I would beg my mum to tell me definitively that we would get back together, which she was smart enough to avoid doing. I would lament and lament to my partner in Stoke but shut down every suggestion they began with, “What if you told him -”

I was something of a nightmare.

In the two years that we weren’t together, lots of things happened.

Without putting all of his business online, it was at midnight on the motorway from Nottingham to The South™ that I realised: this boy could’ve relegated me to Acquaintance and I would still be in the passenger seat, on the phone with him, doing my damnedest to keep him safe. It didn’t matter that it was approaching 5am when we got him home – we got him home.

At some point, we started going to shows together again. The first time, we had two mates with us as something of a buffer, but that didn’t stop me needing a quick cry in the bathroom. I thought I could get away with it – I was the only one of the four of us who was welcome in the Ladies’ bathroom – but he saw my face afterwards and voiced concern. I realised then that the sign on the door wouldn’t have mattered, that he would’ve walked into Hell itself if he thought I wasn’t safe, and it was hard work not to start crying again.

We went to see our favourite band as just the two of us. I checked the setlist in the hostel we were staying in but I didn’t tell him what I had found – that Our Song, from when we were a couple, was first up on every setlist I could find. I knew full well I wouldn’t get away with slipping off to the bathroom for the first song of the set, so I reverted to Plan B. I got really quite drunk. Perhaps for similar reasons, he got really quite drunk as well. By the time that I had shepherded him back to the hostel, he was swaying. I sat him in a leather armchair and smiled nicely at the guy who was using the kitchen table for his crossword as I filled a glass of water.

When I thrust it at my ex with the pronouncement, “Do you want a drink of water? That’s an instruction,” I heard Crossword Guy chuckle.

I wasn’t able to sober my ex up quite enough, because when we got back to our room, he threw up into a mesh wastepaper basket, and thus also all over the floor. I’ve always been the strongest-stomached out of most groups of people, and vomit is kind of my specialty after all the years of bulimia (not to brag or anything). I cleaned up with the efficiency of a serial killer and stationed my ex in front of the toilet, occasionally fanning him, occasionally reminding him to sip water, promising him that he would feel better soon.

I couldn’t stop reflecting on how gorgeous I found him, even having just mopped up the contents of his stomach. I told myself it was because I was drunk, but truthfully the vomiting incident and subsequent rapid cleanup had sobered me up plenty.

I wondered if it was noble to love someone like this, even when they didn’t return the feeling. Maybe it was just pathetic. I wrote some bad poetry and went to sleep feeling raw.

People started running out of patience.

I think that as soon as it was clarified to one member of the polycule that our feelings were definitely still mutual, both of my partners (and my mum, who isn’t a member of my polycule but is part of my family) quickly became just a smidge frustrated. They loved me, sure, but they also loved him, and could see how much pain we were both in. Even when they managed to hound us into Conversations About Our Feelings, we were avoidant and frightened and prone to breaking into banter instead of focusing on the matter at hand. For a while, things existed in a very weird place.

He admitted to me that his Feelings were definitely romantic, but also that he was scared of needing to break up with me again. In his words, “It’s fine that you have a lot of baggage, but I don’t want us to get back together until I’m hench enough to carry it without putting it back down again.” I pointed out all the ways things were stabilising around us but I didn’t press the issue, and I didn’t say “I’d take ten more breakups if it meant ten days of being your partner again.” We kept getting a tiny ways into the conversation that would get us back together and then getting distracted, and in my case at least, scared.

It was my other Stoke partner who finally broke the silence. Specifically, they messaged him and they messaged me, telling us we had an hour to start The Conversation before they phoned or messaged the group chat to start it for us. It still took us some procrastinating (which, as I’m sure you’ve gathered, is our specialty) but we did it. We laid our guts out to each other and I admitted to some of the more cringe pining I had done, and somehow in amongst the banter, as naturally as our usual conversation, The Conversation established we were a couple again.

It felt like a weight had lifted from my chest. I got teary.

When he started to look at universities outside of England, I soothed the pang of don’t-leave-me-sadness with the more dominant feeling of relief and excitement that he was going to end up somewhere he felt safe.

That somewhere ended up being Liverpool, which is in England and not too far from Stoke, but he was still Going Away to somewhere outside of my two usual haunts. He seemed eager to soothe my above-mentioned sadness too, before I even voiced it, telling me about the drawer of my stuff I could have at his place.

On the 4/20 of 2023, I went to his place with my Daddy, who in typical Daddy form busied herself with fixing my boyfriend’s new bike. She found reason (legitimate reason, to be fair) to go to Halford’s, and my boyfriend nipped into another room only to return with a red drawstring pouch in hand.

The first thing I noticed was his hands shaking, and then that he was down on one knee. And I knew.

His voice shook. So did mine, I’m sure, when I responded to him proposing to me with a near-automatic yes. Two years of pining suddenly felt very short and very worth it in retrospect, but this is also a story about how pining alone will not move things along. Unfortunately, both parties have to be brave, repeatedly.

But we were. We could have suffered for decades, but we were brave.

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The Basics: What Is Autism?

Welcome to The Basics, where I give an overview of a topic that I talk about a lot. This time, already more than a week late for the start of Autism Acceptance Month, I’m here to give an overview about autism.

I talk about a lot of complex connections between autism and kink, autism and sex, autism and mental health, etc etc. I never want to condescend readers who are already immersed in the discourse, so I usually skip the bit where I explain what autism is and how it affects a person’s life. But there’s no shame in being unaware of exactly what autism is or what it’s like to live with – nobody is born knowing anything and a lot of conversations about it, like with most things, assume a level of knowledge that not everybody is going to have. If you don’t mind that this is a sex blog, this post will hopefully constitute a useful primer that you can send to your loved ones instead of trying to explain it all yourself.

Autism, originally named “autistic psychopathy” because psychiatric medicine was Like That, is a neurodevelopmental condition (that is, it affects the development of the brain), and some autistic people (including myself) regard it as a disability. (We sometimes refer to autism as a “neurotype” to indicate that it is not a disease or ailment but rather a valid way for a brain to be arranged. However, many autistic people express pride in their different neurotype, or neurodivergence, whilst still feeling like being autistic in a world built for allistic (non-autistic) people is disabling for them.) This of course means that autistic people are at risk of ableism perpetuated by individuals, as well as by organisations like Autism Speaks, which most autistic people hate for their emphasis on a cure, their advocacy for unethical practices including ABA, their puzzle piece imagery that suggests we’re incomplete people, and/or for the fact that only a fraction of the money they pull in is spent on helping autistic people in any tangible way (here’s a PDF from ASAN with more info). Because autism affects the brain, it expresses itself in a huge variety of ways, but some common ones can include hyper- or hyposensitivity of one or more of the senses, periods of intense hyperfocus on a singular topic or task, difficulty learning and applying social rules, and difficulty with interoception (the perception of one’s own body including hunger, thirst, etc). My favourite quote on this topic comes from Tony Attwood: “If you’ve met one person on the autism spectrum, you’ve met one person on the autism spectrum,” i.e. autistic people are just as different from one another as allistic people are from one another.

One thing that often comes up when autistic people talk about their experiences is the fact that they only represent, well, autistic people who can talk. Some autistic people never talk in English words at all, and some (like me) can talk your ear off until they’re overwhelmed, distressed, tired, etc, at which point they lose the use of most or all of their vocabulary. Some autistic people will find use in augmented communication devices that can say particular words or phrases for them, while others use sign language, write things down, or use a combination of different methods of communication. It’s true that I don’t know what it’s like to be an entirely nonspeaking autistic person, but I do know that nonspeaking =/= non-communicative. Some autistic people struggle to read tone, facial expressions, body language etc, but that doesn’t mean that these aren’t ways for an autistic person to communicate. I typically work on the assumption that all people have something of value to say, no matter how they say it, and that it’s worth trying to perceive the atypical, nonverbal ways a person might communicate.

As a linguistics graduate I also tend to assume that language is extremely important in most areas of human existence, but I’m confident in saying that it’s especially important when discussing disability, just as it is with other marginalised identities and groups. You might see a lot of autistic people talk about a preference for identity-first language, as opposed to person-first language. Person-first language refers to “people with autism”, while identity-first language refers to “autistic people”. Many autistic people, including myself, prefer the latter, as they feel that the former (often championed more passionately by allistic people than autistic people) linguistically removes their autism from them, positioning it the way we would a diagnosis of illness rather than neurodivergence, and implying that personhood and autism are at odds with one another. That said, we have the right to decide which language we identify with, and if someone tells you that they prefer to be called a “person with autism”, you should definitely listen to them. Also, given Hans Asperger’s relationship to eugenics as well as some people’s opinion that Aspergers Syndrome is essentially autism, but in a way that’s useful to capitalism, you shouldn’t apply the labels of Aspie or Aspergers to someone else unless that’s the language they use to describe themselves.

Since autism is technically a developmental disability, I once found myself punching one of my Year 7 classmates for using the word “retard”, which I think most people know is an ableist slur. Except I wasn’t defending my own autism; it would take 6 years after my younger sibling’s diagnosis for me to get mine, at the age of 14. There were a lot of reasons for this, but one of them was my assigned-female status that encouraged me to mask a lot of my difficulties and discouraged the adults around me from labelling them as autism. It is well-known that diagnostic criteria are usually sculpted according to the presentation of a condition in your average white male, meaning that many assigned-female autistic people are diagnosed late or never, as are autistic people of colour and autistic people with one or more additional condition. Autism is not a condition which significantly warps your relationship to reality, so you will find that a lot of autistic people (especially online) are self-diagnosed using the plethora of resources that are out there, and formally-diagnosed autistic people welcome them with open arms (and if they don’t, they suck and you should unfollow them), especially given the inaccessibility of a formal diagnosis if you aren’t a cookie-cutter white guy (and sometimes even if you are).

Autism is often diagnosed in children, in part because they have not yet learned the bundle of masking techniques that make it harder to spot autism in adults, and in part because the diagnostic criteria were originally written based on only child subjects. However, because it’s how your brain is built, it’s a lifelong condition that affects adults as much as it does children, and autistic adults are out there in your communities, hopefully living fulfilling and safe lives. I say this because people often forget autistic adults in their zeal for helping autistic kids, when in reality autism can feel more disabling in adulthood because of the added pressures of employment, housing, etc. Upsettingly, this focus on kids still doesn’t result in them receiving appropriate resources. If you can deal with ableism and child abuse then I strongly encourage you to investigate the #StopTheShock movement, as well as to research the harms of ABA, or Applied Behaviour Analysis; both these things indicate a desire to remove a child’s autism, or at least make it less visible to surrounding adults, rather than increasing their quality of life and equipping them with skills that will make life as an autistic adult easier. Resources for autistic people in general are either non-existent or wildly condescending, which is one of the reasons so many of us are being shouty on the internet, and resources are even more sparse for adults than they are for kids. There are disproportionately more “autism-friendly” screenings of children’s movies than there are of teen or grown-up movies, and autism-friendliness seems to mean little more than “you can get out of your seat and the volume isn’t as aggressive” in most of these settings. Again, autistic people are as different from one another as allistic people are, so trying to make any venue or event “autism-friendly” sounds like something of a fool’s errand to me. (I need audio to either be nonexistent or painfully loud, for example, and dimmed lights make my head hurt because visual processing is not my forte even in regular lighting. This makes so-called “autism-friendly” screenings distinctly Morgan-unfriendly, but I’m glad that some people get benefit from them and I hope we can build on the model to allow even more autistic people, kids and adults, to enjoy cinema.)

There is a lot more to be said about autism and the amazing autistic people educating others than I can fit into a single blog post, but the key points are:

Autism is a brain difference that manifests differently in everyone
It affects sensory perception, social interaction and attention/inattention, among other things
It is a lifelong condition which many consider a disability, especially in a world not built for us
Most, but not all, autistic people seem to prefer identity-first language (“autistic person”)
If you say “retard” in front of me, in Year 7 or now, I will hit you
Autistic girls, people or colour and adults are underdiagnosed, but this doesn’t actually make them any less likely to be autistic
I personally stand strongly in favour of self-diagnosis for autism
Autism-friendly cinema screenings and shopping hours annoy me an unreasonable amount due to the aforementioned differences between autistic people’s needs
There are many, many autistic creators and educators whose voices are valid, valuable and worth your time to check out! I can’t link all of them, but here are a few:

Thank you for reading, and I’ll see y’all soon!

Splitting in BPD (Or: A Guide To Loving Me When I Hate Your Guts)

Allow me to define “splitting”. It’s a behaviour often found in individuals with BPD, characterised by suddenly and intensely wanting or needing to detach from someone to whom you were previously attached. I can only compare it to those mad thoughts you have about going to live in some nearby woods when you’re 14 and arguing with your mum about your school uniform, but amplified to be inescapable, all of that adolescent rage attached to it alongside fear, hurt, revulsion, heartbreak and every other feeling you could attribute to a trauma response. It’s the brain’s way of protecting you from more unhealthy attachments, so it happens in response to a stimulus of some sort – but one of the cornerstones of BPD is hypersensitivity, so the stimulus that prompts us to split might not actually be as dangerous as it feels. Whether it’s a punch to the face or an ignored text message, it feels intensely dangerous, so much so that my brain then takes action, working to replace any fondness with anger or fear by creatively reinterpreting real-world evidence until it fits with the all-or-nothing, “this person is dead to me” narrative.

The first thing that you need to know about splitting is that it hurts me more than it hurts you. You will probably feel wounded, rejected, anxious, frustrated, and it will suck, but I am also having all of those emotions in BPD form, i.e. with the intensity of a thousand suns. I don’t just put you out of my mind entirely when I split on you; I agonise over it. My thumb hovers over block buttons until the muscles in my hand cramp whilst I try to weigh up how reasonable I’m being. I type and delete messages I will never send about what’s hurting me and what I need. Sometimes, I act like a dick, and I know as I’m doing it that I’m being dickish, but it feels like the only safe thing to do. My deep, reptile-brain impulse is to destroy the relationship beyond repair so that there’s never any danger of more hurt, and I spend hours with my stomach in knots, arguing with myself about how I can’t have normal human relationships and how selfish moving to the woods might actually be. I can identify when I’m splitting (though I couldn’t as a furious 14-year-old) but I don’t split for no reason. I can’t automatically reconnect with reality when my brain is twisting things, blowing them out of proportion and shoving them through traumatised lenses, but I can try and conduct myself in a way that Connected-to-Reality Morgan won’t deeply regret. This mostly involves distancing myself, not in any embarrassing noticeable ways like hitting that block button but just reaching out less, trying not to give my BPD any new ammo with which it can maintain the split. At this point, frustrating though it is, all you can do is leave me to my space and my thoughts.

This brings me onto the second thing you need to know about splitting: unsplitting is hard work. Fighting my impulse to run is hard enough, but unsplitting requires you to walk directly towards the scary thing. There’s a principle in Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT) called “Opposite Action”, where you identify an irrational feeling or impulse and you act in the exact opposite way that your impulse wants you to. In splitting, for me, this looks like sending a message after a long period of quiet, trying to make plans or being openly affectionate towards you again. They are small acts that are too terrifying to commit whilst sober a lot of the time, so Stoned or Drunk Morgan picks up the slack while their fear and hurt are somewhat numbed. This opposite action can only happen, though, once I’ve identified why I’m splitting and whether this person is actually dangerous. The obvious piece of advice here, then, is to continually prove through your actions that you are not a danger to me. The other piece of advice I would like to give is that if you think I’m doing Opposite Action, or if I’ve been quiet for a while, or in general if you don’t know where you stand with me, just respond with enthusiasm. Make it clear that you’re glad to hear from me. Essentially, reward me for doing the hard scary thing, and leave the ball in my court when it comes to beginning a discussion about the splitting itself, because I’m probably too scared for that in this early stage of unsplitting.

Here is the third thing about splitting: it’s not about you. It’s really, really not. My brain, with its rigid little boxes, has tried to file you in the same cabinet as some other people who did some other things. If you get busy and don’t respond to my inane messages about memes and movies, my brain tries to put you into a cabinet with other people who stopped messaging me abruptly, which includes people who did that exact thing in order to manipulate me. If you said something on a rainy Monday morning which came off as irritable, my brain tries to put you into the same filing cabinet as the man who shoved me towards the top of the staircase when I was 15, because in that situation, irritability preceded abuse. Those filing cabinets are alarmed, and they were like that before your files showed up. I’m really stretching the filing metaphor here, but I want you to know that the majority of the time, a split is a function of my brain, not of our relationship – it’s usually only minimally connected to your behaviour, and has much more to do with the behaviour of cunts you’ve never even met. All I can say is try – and I know it’s fucking hard – not to take it personally when my brain links you to evil bastards and floods me with fear. If you do take it personally, mid-split or mid-unsplit is maybe not the most constructive time to ask me for reassurance, but if you understand splitting (due to blog posts like these), you have the opportunity and the vocabulary to talk to other loved ones about what’s going on with us, so you can at least process it a little before you and I start to discuss it.

The fourth thing, for everyone to know about splitting, is: it passes. It’s hard work, and sometimes it’s not worth it. I split on celebrities after one transphobic joke and I don’t care enough about them to work through all my DBT techniques in order to forgive them and move on. I split on people who, with distance, I end up seeing are legitimately dangerous. But I also split on people who are patient and loving towards me, who accept that sometimes I need space and sometimes I need attention and sometimes I need help figuring out which one I need. I split on people who are beloved by my support network and said support network helps me to unsplit, safe in the knowledge that this time, it’s definitely just my BPD and not a real threat to my wellbeing. I split on people regularly, in smaller ways and bigger ones, but I conquer it when I realise it’s worth conquering. My brain has this extremely strong mechanism by which to keep me safe, but I’m stronger even than that, because I have learned and am learning how to shut the filing cabinets and say hi. The fact that people with BPD have relationships like the ones I now have, characterised by love and mutual support and trust, is a testament to the ferocity with which we fight, every day, to be good people despite our pain. And again, let me reiterate, splitting is painful, but us people with BPD know that, and knowingly take on that risk when they form and keep relationships, every single day. Therefore, my final piece of advice is to remember that people with BPD are working hard to stay in your life, on purpose, every day, because we have decided that you’re worth it. Remember that we’re people, and we’re often great people, and for that reason alone we’re worth the hard work, too.