Remember, EM POC only!
This message is to my EM POC comrades: Angel loves all of you.
Especially as of late, I have truly been feeling like this community has worked wonders in keeping me stable when it comes to handling the massive jar of mayo that this site can be sometimes.
How are you all?
My long term relationship that we both thought was for life is imploding right now, and it’s not even because of anything new and recent, it’s because we finally figured out some unhealthy dynamics got set years ago when we were in worse situations in life and dealing with crises and now that we’re looking at it it’s just unbearable. A lot is my fault, some is their's, but in another way it's neither of our faults, it's just an unavoidable tragedy. It's so depressing to confront how we both were utterly set up to fail in this (or any) relationship by the combined forces of capitalism, systemic racism, and systemic patriarchy. I don't want this to sound like a cop-out, I don't want to say "oh my difficulties with emotions and relationships are not my fault because the systems did this to me and I bear no blame," I can see clearly (now, when it’s too late to prevent them) the mistakes I made. But it's incredibly frustrating and heartbreaking that when they were happening I couldn't have done anything else because of how I was malformed by all the trauma of living in the belly of a racist, murderous empire surrounded by toxic hateful racist monsters. At every step of the way we've been trying our very best (I've been doing therapy for years, and they tried but they just couldn't find a therapist who wasn’t a capitalist radfem shitlib that would gaslight them and do more harm than good), but at every step for years and years and years the traumas carved into us from early childhood through adulthood sabotaged our efforts. They ask, "why did you do X horrible thing when we needed you to do Z?" and when I examine it it's genuinely just because of how the racist fabric of America destroyed my family and destroyed me to the point that X was all I was capable of doing in those times of stress. I didn't get to have a safe environment in which to grow up healthily -- I had a fucking nightmare forced upon me when I was just a little kid and it broke me, just more subtly than it broke my other family members. But it broke me nonetheless. I ask them "why did you do Y when we needed you to do Z?" and when they examine it it's because of how abuse at the hands of the toxic patriarchical fabric of America starting from a very young age carved such deep liabilities and weaknesses into them that they couldn't be healthier. And then our traumas intersected in bad ways. If just one of us hadn't had our fatal weaknesses, we could have maybe helped the other. But with both of us having them, our attempts to help each other actually led us to fall into unhealthy dynamics instead and now the traumatic memories of those dynamics make it -- I think -- impossible to move forward and heal together.
Even with this understanding, even with these big breakthroughs, it may be too late. I think it very likely is even though we desperately want it to not be too late. They said "I don't want us to have to split up. It would be a horrible tragedy. It should be a simple choice: We love each other and didn't mean to do harm, now that we understand what went wrong and how the systems did this to us it should be obvious that we just stay together and fix things together. The reason it's not simple for me is that everything's been so traumatic I don't know if it's possible, healthy, or even ethical for us to try to stay together and fix things together."
And I get that, I really do. It’s not a cop-out, it’s true. So much traumatic shit has happened that I can't humanely and ethically ask them to stay. Asking is pointless anyway -- they already want to stay and make it better, it's just a question of whether that's even possible or healthy for them to try to do, or if too much harm has been done. It's not a decision to be made, it's a yes/no fact that has to be uncovered and then whatever that fact is, we’ll have to deal with it even if we hate it.
CW bleak, self-harm, despondency, doomerism
I'm so tired of living in the aftermath of being broken by the system. I'm so tired of living with the harms still perpetuating, still ruining my life and destroying any chances I think I have at happiness. I’m tired of causing harm to the people I love — I want to give love, joy, safety, health, and nurturing to my loved ones but instead I’ve brought pain and suffering. I don't even want to fight back or strike against systemic oppression anymore because I’m so broken and exhausted. To keep going is too painful. Even if now I manage to fix some of the shit that was done to me, it will always have destroyed the most important relationship I’ve ever had and robbed us of our life together. I’ll always have to live in the aftermath of that loss, and the loss will never go away. Every moment I exist hurts too much already and it looks like it’s just going to get worse from here on out. I've been through loss and grief enough times before and I know that it doesn't really get better even with therapy, it just makes the next one worse and the next one after that even worse. I thought I'd escaped that cycle finally; now that I know I haven't, that I can't, that this path was set for me before I even hit puberty, I just want to sleep forever. Let me fucking rest. Life is torture and I don't get why people who say they love me want me to keep being tortured. I have to endure, for now, I have responsibilities and it’s uncertain how things will shake out. My beloved has asked me not to give up and so, on the off chance that somehow things work out, I have to keep going for now. But I see nothing but torment ahead and I resent the loved ones who need me to stay alive for making me suffer the torture of existence instead of finally finding the peace I so desperately need.
What a cruel, pointless life. It's inhumane to do this to people. It's inhumane to make kids deal with systemic trauma that just breaks them and turns them into broken adults. I wish my parents hadn't emigrated to America, but they couldn't have predicted what the global war on terror would have done. Maybe if they'd stayed in their birth country we'd have been killed by it anyway, though it’s enough on the periphery of the battlegrounds so far that maybe not. Sometimes I think maybe being killed by it would have been preferable to being trapped in this broken life I've lived anyway. I look at pictures of me when I was a kid before the cataclysmic harms were done to us, and I look at pictures of me after, and it's stark how visibly dead inside I've been since.
I hope reincarnation is real. This life has been a tragedy and a waste. I want a do-over. I’m incapable of believing in anything so spiritual or metaphysical though so I don’t even get that fiction as solace.
I envy white people here, at least the ones with semi-healthy families (unlike my poor, traumatized partner). For all that there's something so fucked up and fundamentally wrong with many of those white folks, they seem happier. They have their own traumas to be sure, but they don’t have the trauma that comes from being nonwhite in this KKK society and right now, looking at how that racial trauma has destroyed my life, I envy them for not having been brutalized that way.
you have a very beautiful way of writing and explaining your hurt. I am so deeply sorry for your pain. sending you love and solidarity
Thank you. All my best writing is born out of immense suffering. I wish I didn't have to suffer so much. I'm so tired
It sounds like what you and your partner have is really beautiful, I'm so sorry about everything you've gone through.
My partner and I reached this point once before, we broke up and lived separately for a while. I'm so so thankful that we made our way back to each other and now our relationship is stronger than ever. I hope you make it through this time as unscathed as possible, and live long enough to know happiness again. Much love comrade.
Update: They left. They left and said they cannot ever come back, even if they heal their trauma, even if I heal my trauma, because the relationship itself is too damaged. They also said they're just starting to realize their trauma was way worse than they had realized, and contributed much more to the bad dynamics than they'd thought -- earlier they thought it was mostly mine that was the problem, and as we were discussing the breakup they realized just how much harm their trauma had done to me and even brought my own out too (which hurt them in turn).
We were just doomed. We were just fucked from before the start. We were completely and utterly set up to fail. I'm glad you and your partner were able to reconnect, but my partner is too principled and stubborn to be willing to do that with me -- when they say it's over and they'll never be back, they mean it in a way that I cannot doubt. Honestly, your case is probably a great outlier, most people never reconnect after splitting up.
I don't know what to do with my life now. I restructured so much of my life to be devoted to them. I got through the brutal work days because I wanted to provide for them. I worked on myself to be better because I wanted to grow and heal for them.
I can feel your love and pain through your words, I'm sorry for your loss.
I do think it's rare, and it involved me being homeless, so not the happiest story either to be honest, but I'm just about putting it behind me recently.
The interconnectedness, deep solidarity and true comradery are one of the most divine things about a close relationship. However in an extremely atomised society such as ours, where these close bonds are only ever seen as "normal" between romantic partners, they are tested and strain immensely under the weight of the pressures we are each made to indure without the support of a wider community.
advice, take it or leave it
As you enter this new stage in your life, I'd encourage you to read up a bit about queerplatonic partnerships. It's at least one potential direction for your life going forward. And even if you bounce off the ideas, I hope it would at least help you to start to see an outline of a future you're happier with.
My relationship with my partner also looks very different today than it did before. We're trying to live a life where we're two close by points in a wider network of support. We're having mixed results though to be honest, solidarity seems to be hard won these days.
However bad what happened was, I hope you will still hold within you the belief that you're worthy of being loved. It seems like you've grown a lot together, and even though your paths must diverge, I hope you will carry your love for them forward with you as you begin to rebuild your habits and routines. Stay strong out there
Thank you so much. I shouldn't have checked this at work I'm sobbing right now. I'm so scared and heartbroken. When they told me about the longstanding problems they thought I'd leave them over it, but instead I said I wanted to address all the problems so that we could look back on this as the moment we really turned things around and made our relationship healthier than ever. They said they would like that, but since then it seems they've broken too hard to be able to do the work with me. Thanks for giving me a shred of hope that even if we break up now we may be able to reconnect.