To open the blog and the comic I wanted to start at the beginning, since this Entry starts before I entered polyamory.
Hello to everyone just joining me for the first time! I am Kokoro Castillo. I am a married, bisexual woman in a polyamorous relationship. I started this blog because people kept asking me relationship questions. They were curious about how I got into this lifestyle and how I am managing it. I will answer questions and share my misadventures in the world of polyamory. I have changed the names and some of the descriptions to protect the identities of those involved. The comic will cover some adventures while the blog will offer more depth into how my setup works.
I would like to caveat that everyone who practices polyamory has their own way of doing it. It varies with the people in the relationship and what everyone is comfortable with. I feel that the only wrong way is not communicating with your partners or forcing a relationship to continue when it should just end. So it’s just like managing a monogamous relationship, just with more people to consider when scheduling anything. But more to follow in another blog entry about my dependence on Google Calendar!
I’ll start with things rolling with how I came to be in a polyamorous relationship with my husband, Shep, but to truly explain it, I have to start at the beginning.
After college, I started dating, Sam, a guy who was more interested in playing World of Warcraft than interacting with or having sex with me. It was infuriating to take time out of my schedule to spend it with him to be ignored. I thought I loved Sam and I started to doubt myself. Maybe I was too damaged, too clingy after exiting a relationship with Dave. Maybe I was just still too stuck on what I thought was love with Dave.
I smiled and tried to engage with him. I caved and made a damn WoW account thinking that by getting involved with something he was interested in, we’d have more in common. I tried to enjoy the game that he loved so damn much and I just could not get into it. The colors were too garish, the story left me wanting, I hated everything about it because every minute we were in the game, the less we did in real life. The guild was more important, raids were definitely more important. I resented Blizzard; I resented Azeroth; I resented that he was more attracted to his buddy’s Blood Elf mage than to me.
Sam poured everything into that game. I had nothing. I suffered through it thinking that maybe I just wasn’t worth the effort. I fell into a deep depression and rarely left my house except to get groceries or to go to work. I had lost my spark. I started to stagnate. My photography lacked vision, I suffered through a job in a department store portrait studio and felt my soul die each day I spent in that cheesy vest and hat.
My best friends from high school, Dawn and Tammy, did their damnedest to get me out of the house to do something, anything besides play that damn game. We did mostly low key things; dinner, movies and talked about anything that wasn’t WoW. A few of my other friends in our circle from high school, April and Holly, were less enthusiastic about getting me offline since they were feeding that Sam’s addiction by scolding ME for daring to miss a raid to go to a movie. I should have realized that they wanted Sam and me out of the picture.
I was lucky, I had friends that actually gave a damn. Another friend from my family’s church, Lisa, made it her mission to get me involved with the women’s group meetings and went out of her way to get me to go. I actually had one college class a semester earlier so we had something more than religion to talk about. I’m not religious, and my bisexuality put me in a strange place within our faith, so I figured that it couldn’t hurt. I needed the validation, so why not God?
I had almost forgotten that Lisa was an American Otaku. There is a difference, but that’s a topic for another day… but it made sense. She was another art major but our mutual class was Japanese. We talked about our favorite manga, anime, and ships before we went to the church to enjoy more… pious activities… like… scrapbooking… or… baking cookies BUT I actually enjoy those things. We started brainstorming ideas for our own manga and she even drew some incredible concept pages. There was even talk of forming our own artist group to go to conventions to tell our manga. Those days visiting with her were a lot of fun in my routine of work and hating WoW. Between Dawn, Tammy and Lisa, I might have been able to keep going in my relationship with Sam, they brought me back to reality.
One afternoon while visiting with Lisa, we were chatting about our favorite old anime series. I was looking through her anime when a male voice joined the conversation and started talking about Mahou Tsukai Tai. Since Lisa didn’t seem concerned, we had a conversation and when I turned around, there was some random guy sitting in the living room. Being polite, I introduced myself and found out that he was Lisa’s older brother, Shep. He had just moved to the area and was crashing with Lisa until he found his own place.
I was attracted to Shep and we had a lot in common but, I was dating Sam. I loved Sam. And he was my friend’s brother, I couldn’t do that to her. I was there to hang out with Lisa, not Shep. But he was there, and we all hung out together watching anime and just making conversation about everything. I figured that because I was his little sister’s friend that he wouldn’t be interested in someone like me. I had a mile long list of everything that was wrong with me. My self-esteem had been shredded, why else would my boyfriend have zero interest in me if there wasn’t something wrong with me?
I was in a bad place. It wasn’t really me, it was my depression controlling my life and destroying my identity. I was putting on a happy face for my friends who were trying to make me feel better. I was putting on a smile for my family, the people at work, I was smiling in Teamspeak for the damn guild. I felt my mask cracking under the pressure of it all. I wanted to scream. I wanted to take Sam’s computer, smash it to bits, and burn it to ash. I didn’t want to interact with him through a monitor. I didn’t want to carry a gaming laptop to his apartment and play way. I wanted him to actually touch me; notice me.
To be continued…
No comments:
Post a Comment