Happier News

It’s been a minute! We haven’t posted in here in over a week. There are a couple reasons for that. For one, we had a few different things going on and bounced between them a bit too much to collect a full post’s worth of thoughts at a time. We’ve also started explicitly communicating with each other more, rather than relying on shared memory, which has sort of replaced some of the “journaling” urge that this blog exists to fill. (That’s going well, by the way! So far I don’t think that passing notes back and forth has had any actual effect on the way we’ve handled anything, but I do think it’s a much healthier habit to be in.)

The last few posts here were all kind of sad. I was angry at our brain for seemingly giving Holly the preferential “host” treatment, I was angry at Holly and myself for letting me get in the way of her passions, Holly had to post an update to sort of calm me down… It was a little bit rough. But things are good now! I have a couple things that I’m happy about and I wanted to record them here.

For example: The new Fall Out Boy album came out the other day and we’ve been listening to it a lot. It’s really good. Holly and I like all the same music, but we like different music more. We’ve got music that we consider “ours” because I like it more, or “Holly’s” beacuse she likes it more, but we both like all of it to some degree. The center of the venn diagram seems to be FOB, we both really like them. So it’s been really nice to have new music to listen to “together”. We aren’t ever in a position where we can both be listening at once, but we can still feel like we’re doing stuff together. It’s been really nice.

There are a couple individual lines that have stood out to us in ways that are clearly not intended by the songwriters, and that aren’t even really readings that are supported by the rest of the text, but we’ve enjoyed extracting some meaning out of them.

And I know, I know, I’ve made mistakes
And I know, I know, but at least they were mine to make

Obviously this song was not written about being plural but the affirmation of the self is something that really resonated with me. I certainly have made mistakes, but that’s part of being here! I have to learn to be a part of this system and mistakes come with the territory.

But baby please, I just need someone to hold me
Even though you don’t even know me

This resonated as well, since I’ve been really anxious about introducing myself to people Holly knows. People who aren’t from online, in circles where I can expect them to actually understand what’s going on with us. And I’ve been afraid of how people who I have all these memories of being close to would react to me. They’re people who I feel like I should be comfortable confiding in, but they don’t even know who I am.

But I said I was coming here to post some happier things, and that’s a pretty good lead in to the other thing I wanted to talk about. I did, finally, introduce myself to one of Holly’s friends, and it went way better than I was scared about! Sure, most of them still don’t know, but it’s such a huge relief to have someone who knows and is on my side.

Holly made a post a little while ago while anxiously talking about, saying something like “If you’re one of the very few friends from my offline life who follows me on here, and you would be cool about this, please tell me so I know you’d be cool. If you wouldn’t be cool, please continue pretending you haven’t seen these posts so we can live this lie a little while longer.” This ended up being a pretty big mistake, we thought we’d be able to interpret a lack of responses as “they just didn’t see it” but we ended up just getting even more anxious about it.

So finally we caved, I got Holly’s blessing to move forward and I just straight up asked them to tell me whether or not they’d seen the post. They hadn’t, and I nervously entered a conversation about it. I wrote some preamble asking them to keep an open mind about what I was about to say, but it turned out to be unecessary. She clarified that she hadn’t seen that post, but she did know about me and just wasn’t sure how to approach us about the subject.

I’m really happy to have a foothold into establishing relationships with Holly’s friends. Having it go so well the first time has really helped with our anxiety. Hopefully it continues to go so well when we talk to the others. :)