stella41b
Posts: 4258
Joined: 10/16/2007
From: SW London (UK)
Status: offline
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Sometimes it's just not meant to be or there are other factors beyond your control. Yes when you are searching and trying to find someone it can be harder but also when you are putting in too much effort to be with someone and to find yourself in a relationship you leave yourself open to a greater degree of self-deception.
How close is close enough, and how close is too close? And what happens when your expectations about the relationship exceed both the possibilities and potential of the relationship? Is this not when it stops becoming fair, not just to the other person but also yourself?
This is how I spent my last weekend. M and I have known each other ever since I moved into the hostel for the homeless in London where she worked, which is just over two years. I was the first transgendered female to live in the hostel, at the time it had the reputation of being one of the roughest in London, and within a week I came out and announced to everyone that I was going for full gender reassignment. I had issues, inside I was carrying a lot of anger and resentment towards other people, and this was exacerbated by hostility and prejudice from the staff, especially the hostel manager - a woman who ruled the hostel like a dictatorship. M was married, working and popular at the hostel among the residents and this proved to be my lifeline. She was the one who inspired me to come out of myself and start working with other residents using my theatre.
The turning point came when within the same week a woman in the hostel committed suicide and I along with three other women were sexually assaulted by a convicted paedophile who had broken bail and who was living at the hostel under false identity. The manager didn't attend the funeral of the woman and refused to take any action over the sexual assaults. One of the women brought in the police leading to his arrest and I lodged an official complaint against the manager at the head office of the organization which ran the hostel. M and I worked to develop a theatre group and this became popular among the residents within the hostel. The paedophile was arrested and I won the official complaint.
The manager was beside herself with rage. The hostility and harrassment continued but M and the hostel residents stood by me, and through this M and I became close. This led to a revolution in the hostel but at the same time M's marriage was breaking up and the manager was trying to constructively dismiss her. I was quickly resettled and given an apartment because the manager wanted me out of her hostel before she lost her job and shortly afterwards M was disciplined by the hostel organization on a trumped up charge and forced to resign, at the same time when her marriage broke up and she was forced to move out of her home by her husband. She suffered a breakdown, turned to drink, and I spent much of that Christmas with her supporting her.
We stayed close but as a result of what she went through M has become angry and bitter, up to the point where she lost all her friends and had problems with her mother, with whom she was living until recently when she was thrown out onto the streets and forced to live in a hostel.
Last week M reached out and I responded and for all intents and purposes we were in a relationship and it looked like we had found the solution through being together. I have worked to overcome my issues with other people and my anger and resentment, I have my theatre and charity work and a growing sense of inner peace and self-confidence, and much of this has been inspired by people in London and also people from here on CM who have reached out to support me over the past two years or so.
We spent the weekend together she came over to me and spent the night visiting her mother in hospital here in South London and then we spent a night at her mother's apartment in North London. She helped me with the theatre and she went through one of her rants and we spent the weekend listening to Bob Marley, Gregory Isaaacs, Linval Thompson, and Trojan Records artists.. In my presence M calmed down, we laughed, she talked, we had a beer and she told me of how she had joined a reggae music website, found a mentor in a Rastafarian woman in the States who was helping her overcome her issues, and she showed me her writing and her poetry.
And it was yesterday when we were spending time together just like a couple, chilling, talking, listening to music, that we realized we were making a mistake in making such a big declaration and trying to be together. The red flag is the one thing which brought us together - the hostel and the homeless charity which runs the hostel. These were the people who had - despite how I was treated in one of their hostels - led me to being assigned an apartment with a housing association and also is an active partner in my support group and charity work, but for M they ruined her life, caused her to have a nervous breakdown and cost her her career.
M still wants to come into the theatre and work with me, but will be working with me and the Broadwater Farm community initiatives in North London with the black community working on a separate 'Jamaica reggae' version of one of my plays. Her biggest passion in life isn't theatre but music, and we realized that close as we are that our lives have now separated into two separate trajectory paths and this is the way it's meant to be. M wants to get her life together, get somewhere to live, find a job, and raise enough to be able to emigrate to Jamaica where she wants to write songs to reggae music. My own trajectory path is taking me across the Atlantic but much further north.
M is a beginner domme, she's a free spirit, she needs lots of space and freedom in a relationship, similar to me (though I'm not domme, but sub), and yet last week found us both desperately reaching out for each other, needy as hell, but we realised that we could do much more for each other in a friendship than being together in a relationship.
I cannot describe her smile or the way she finds calm when you put on a track by the Mighty Diamonds, Bob Marley, Marcia Griffiths, or Peter Tosh, nor can I find words to describe the passion she shows when she talks about reggae music, rocksteady or two tone ska, all I know is that she needs to channel her anger into that sort of passion and find that inner peace for her to find herself and bring herself back together.
People come into your life for a reason and I strongly believe in a philosophy where you live your life as if you only have a week to live - say what you mean and mean what you say, live for the moment, for today, have the courage to be yourself, and to catch the moment and take the opportunities when they come. You see the older you get the quicker time passes, and some opportunities and some people won't come back into your life a second time round.
Yeah right, another big relationship which didn't work out. But this is my point about having expectations which exceed the relationship or the other person. This is where you end up becoming insecure, where you end up getting hurt and this would be a point where I could be thinking 'why does this always happen to me?' or even 'she's a fake' but you know the near misses and almost theres carry just as much success as they do failure and leave you with even more to learn from. So what if the relationship doesn't exist? The friendship remains and is even stronger and this to me is far more important.
I posted on another thread somewhere that love isn't just three little words, but a feeling for someone which you don't understand and perhaps a feeling for which you cannot find the reason why. Thinking about this more I think the same can be said about being alone and loneliness. But then again part of me feels that you're alone simply because that one person isn't in your life and hasn't found you.
Looking for love and searching for love among people never seems to lead to love, but I do believe can teach you a lot about forming relationships. So how do you find love? You think I know? All I can do is guess, and my guess is to learn to recognize it in the face of someone you come across or meet.
But whatever you do, please don't quote me.
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