I have written my own history forty one times and I am tired
- Looking for
- one conversation that gets far enough to be worth the retelling
- Experience
- Seven years, two long dynamics, both ended for undramatic reasons.
- Around
- downtown, Los Angeles
I scrolled back through my sent messages last month and counted. Forty one times I have written some version of the same paragraph: what I am, how long I have been doing it, what happened to the last one, what I am looking for now. Forty one careful, honest, slightly rewritten accounts of my own life, sent to people who mostly did not answer. That is what this place actually asks of you and nobody says it out loud.
Forty four, downtown, submissive, seven years in. Two dynamics, three years and two years, both ended without anybody behaving badly.
So this post is the paragraph, permanently, and I am going to point people at it rather than type it again. What I want is structure that holds through a working week. Expectations set in advance. A weekly evening and daily contact that has a purpose rather than being contact for its own sake. I am extremely reliable and I am at my worst when nothing is asked of me.
The other thing I have learned from counting is that I was doing all the work of being knowable and receiving almost none of it back.
So: tell me something true in return, early. Not looking for anybody who wants my history before they have offered a sentence of their own. Not looking for a conversation that dies at the point where somebody would have to make a decision.