Coming home
Nov. 1st, 2014 17:56![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
torquillSo, those of you who caught my vaguebooking on FB are probably wondering what on earth is going on in my sphere these days.
This is one of the points in my life where I can see clearly that I'm on the cusp of serious life-changing stuff. I have some idea what's involved, but I'm sure that things will come up as I go along, because that's how any renovation goes.
(There's a public component to this and a rather more private one; if I've friended you on LJ/DW it's likely you'll be able to see the private angle. If you can't and you actually want a peek into my headspace, ping me.)
The wide-angle view of what's happened is that I've got a new relationship. Since American English sucks at having a sufficient range of descriptive words for relationships (not just romantic ones) I'll have to go with "lover", though the relationship is far deeper and richer than that. I've knownakienm for most of a decade, I think (not sure exactly how long), but we finally connected on this particular turn of the dance. However, that event by itself is not the earth-shattering kaboom.
Akien lives withklrmn and MB these days, both of whom I have met several times but don't know especially well. There's good feeling and trust all around, which is always a plus when inserting oneself even occasionally into a household.
It's all pretty normal, at least for the poly world. Everybody's made me welcome, which I'm grateful for. What cracked my world open was just *how* welcome.
Akien's one of those people with the experience and insight to divine others' motives with a fair degree of accuracy. (I share that to a somewhat lesser extent.) The upshot of that is that he can often decipher my needs before it even occurs to me that I need to express them. Therefore, he anticipates me -- and when I stop and think about how comfortable a space he has created for me, he simply says that I am welcome there. It goes far, far beyond rearranging the cushions on the couch.
I was a little startled to discover thatklrmn, who I know far less well than I feel like I should, was doing the same thing. Partly because she's shared some of my experiences, or similar ones. It wasn't until the second time they fed me that I discovered that not only were they working around my food sensitivities (they're *just* complex enough that I don't generally ask people to cook for me), but that they had taken my comments from a couple of years ago about my calorie intake, combined it with Leah's own experiences when being fed by restaurants and other people, and gone out of their way to make sure I had enough to eat. More than enough. This is something that I think no one else outside my household has made a point of addressing, because most people don't have the combination of food restrictions and high calorie intake that makes you aware of it. I have food security issues; I've felt anxious about getting enough to eat, of the right kinds of things, every single time I've been to a potluck, no matter how laden the tables are. To know that not only could I eat everything, but I could eat as much of it as I needed, without having to petition for that freedom -- to be automatically accommodated as though my needs were completely commonplace -- was a much bigger deal than most people imagine. And that's just one example of several.
That's what floored me, that and the implications. If it doesn't seem like much to you, consider the following:
You're a consultant on loan to Rigel 4. All of your co-workers are methane breathers. To go anywhere outside your living space, you have to wear a containment suit. You've learned enough of the language to get by, but you don't have the larynx to be fluent. You interact with the natives, get good work done, even joke a little, then you go home to take your suit off and eat the food imported from home. This goes on for years. You get so used to the suit it's like second nature. You don't even think about the fact that all the people you work with are bright purple, or that you still have to use a translation device. Until you run across another human being, and go meet them in their apartment.
Suddenly you're in a space that is not your own rooms where you can take off the suit. You can actually *touch* another person, skin to skin. You can talk freely without translation. There's a novel, in plain-typed English, on the table. They make coffee for you, which is even better than the stuff you import yourself. They know what you mean when you use cultural references, and you don't have to explain what "beats me" means. You can discuss the relative merits of cocoa percentages in chocolate. And it's stunning because you had utterly forgotten how much work it was to interact with the natives around you every day. How much of yourself you had tucked away in a dark closet because nobody cared about your daily oxygen-breather details, or they wouldn't understand even if you brought them up.
I've said I felt like a stranger in a foreign land, and I have been all my life. For the first time I feel like I've found my own species, people who not only speak my language, but know the equivalent of how to make soul food. If you can't grasp why that's huge, I congratulate you on never having felt truly displaced. For me... I think I've found home, after 38 years. That's enough to shake anybody.
This is one of the points in my life where I can see clearly that I'm on the cusp of serious life-changing stuff. I have some idea what's involved, but I'm sure that things will come up as I go along, because that's how any renovation goes.
(There's a public component to this and a rather more private one; if I've friended you on LJ/DW it's likely you'll be able to see the private angle. If you can't and you actually want a peek into my headspace, ping me.)
The wide-angle view of what's happened is that I've got a new relationship. Since American English sucks at having a sufficient range of descriptive words for relationships (not just romantic ones) I'll have to go with "lover", though the relationship is far deeper and richer than that. I've known
akienm for most of a decade, I think (not sure exactly how long), but we finally connected on this particular turn of the dance. However, that event by itself is not the earth-shattering kaboom.Akien lives with
klrmn and MB these days, both of whom I have met several times but don't know especially well. There's good feeling and trust all around, which is always a plus when inserting oneself even occasionally into a household.It's all pretty normal, at least for the poly world. Everybody's made me welcome, which I'm grateful for. What cracked my world open was just *how* welcome.
Akien's one of those people with the experience and insight to divine others' motives with a fair degree of accuracy. (I share that to a somewhat lesser extent.) The upshot of that is that he can often decipher my needs before it even occurs to me that I need to express them. Therefore, he anticipates me -- and when I stop and think about how comfortable a space he has created for me, he simply says that I am welcome there. It goes far, far beyond rearranging the cushions on the couch.
I was a little startled to discover that
klrmn, who I know far less well than I feel like I should, was doing the same thing. Partly because she's shared some of my experiences, or similar ones. It wasn't until the second time they fed me that I discovered that not only were they working around my food sensitivities (they're *just* complex enough that I don't generally ask people to cook for me), but that they had taken my comments from a couple of years ago about my calorie intake, combined it with Leah's own experiences when being fed by restaurants and other people, and gone out of their way to make sure I had enough to eat. More than enough. This is something that I think no one else outside my household has made a point of addressing, because most people don't have the combination of food restrictions and high calorie intake that makes you aware of it. I have food security issues; I've felt anxious about getting enough to eat, of the right kinds of things, every single time I've been to a potluck, no matter how laden the tables are. To know that not only could I eat everything, but I could eat as much of it as I needed, without having to petition for that freedom -- to be automatically accommodated as though my needs were completely commonplace -- was a much bigger deal than most people imagine. And that's just one example of several.That's what floored me, that and the implications. If it doesn't seem like much to you, consider the following:
You're a consultant on loan to Rigel 4. All of your co-workers are methane breathers. To go anywhere outside your living space, you have to wear a containment suit. You've learned enough of the language to get by, but you don't have the larynx to be fluent. You interact with the natives, get good work done, even joke a little, then you go home to take your suit off and eat the food imported from home. This goes on for years. You get so used to the suit it's like second nature. You don't even think about the fact that all the people you work with are bright purple, or that you still have to use a translation device. Until you run across another human being, and go meet them in their apartment.
Suddenly you're in a space that is not your own rooms where you can take off the suit. You can actually *touch* another person, skin to skin. You can talk freely without translation. There's a novel, in plain-typed English, on the table. They make coffee for you, which is even better than the stuff you import yourself. They know what you mean when you use cultural references, and you don't have to explain what "beats me" means. You can discuss the relative merits of cocoa percentages in chocolate. And it's stunning because you had utterly forgotten how much work it was to interact with the natives around you every day. How much of yourself you had tucked away in a dark closet because nobody cared about your daily oxygen-breather details, or they wouldn't understand even if you brought them up.
I've said I felt like a stranger in a foreign land, and I have been all my life. For the first time I feel like I've found my own species, people who not only speak my language, but know the equivalent of how to make soul food. If you can't grasp why that's huge, I congratulate you on never having felt truly displaced. For me... I think I've found home, after 38 years. That's enough to shake anybody.
