Category: sex

Skinny

Posted on by Brenna Lakeson in body image, family, feminism, mental illness, relationships, sex, sexuality, social justice

TW: body image, eating disorders, fatphobia

The first time I thought I was fat, I was in the third grade. I remember that my stomach stuck out, in the way that all little kids’ do – adorable and not concerned about a six-pack. I remember thinking that either there was something wrong with me or that this was what all my peers looked like and I just didn’t know it. While the truth was probably closer to the second option, I logged somewhere in my eight-year-old brain that I needed to do something about my stomach. “Am I fat?” I asked myself, as though that were the worst thing I could be.

Growing up, my parents taught me persistently about exercise and diet. I don’t fault them for this. As an adult, I’ve realized that not everyone learns about food as a child, so I’m grateful that my parents had me try a little bit of everything. I’m also grateful that they instilled in me a love of running, dance, and weight lifting. However, these teachings were not balanced with lessons about moderation. While I was afforded the privilege of a healthy lifestyle, I inherited a guilt about food and exercise. Certain foods were good while others were bad. Working out was a success and rest days were failures.

The first time I started intentionally restricting my eating was my sophomore year of high school. After spending hours looking at a fashion magazine, I sat on the floor of my bathroom one night crying and pulling at the skin of my stomach, disgusted by my own body. For months after that, I lied to my parents and my friends about my eating habits. I pretended to pack lunches for school but brought only an empty lunch box. I told my parents I was eating dinner after play rehearsal and told my friends I was eating dinner at home. I was proud of my self-control. I was proud of my jutting ribs.

I can’t put a finger on when I snapped out of this, although I arguably never did. At one point, I met with one of my youth group leaders who told me that I should be happy with my life and my body because of the joy God was supposed to bring to my life. Despite this unhelpful advice, I did eventually start eating again. However, my feelings about my body didn’t change. As a runner and a former dancer, I coveted skinny thighs and a flat stomach. Emerging from puberty, I began to realize that was not how I was shaped. My thighs became thick and my butt became round. I hated it. Every summer when I worked at a camp, wearing shorts and a bathing suit daily, I resorted to eating only salads and blueberries. Even in times when I felt healthy, I always found something to hate when I looked in the mirror.

My eating disorder returned with a vengance over the past few months. As I recovered from self harm, I found solace in this different but familiar addiction. It was then that I realized I had done the same thing in my high school years. The months after I overcame a period of self harm in high school coincided with that tearful evening in the bathroom. I was trading one trauma response for another. Anorexia was easier to hide and much more socially acceptable, so I turned to it for the sense of control I gave up when I left self-harm behind.

As trite as it sounds, I am still trying to learn to love my body. I am often frustrated by the fact that my dietary and exercise habits don’t result in my “dream body”. Weekly, I am seduced by diets and exercise plans and before/after photos posted by friends. I’m still not sure how to love my body, but I want to try. She has carried me through so much. She has survived assault from others and my own attempts to harm her. I am not angry at my eating disorder or my self-harm because they helped me survive. They were coping mechanisms in times of trauma.

As I try to move forward, I don’t know what this healing will look like, but I know it starts inside with with a small, scared, third grader who has the option to love her little tummy instead of despising it.

The Worst Year

Posted on by Brenna Lakeson in feminism, mental illness, relationships, sex, social justice, theology

TW: assault, abuse, self harm, suicide

This was the worst year of my life. It feels dramatic to say, but I know emphatically that it’s true. My second year of seminary in 2015 is a pretty close runner-up, but the struggles of this year reached a new level. I’ve never been so glad to see a new year come.

It’s also been a pretty rough decade if I’m being realistic. This decade began with an abusive relationship. I spent five years being told what I could wear, who I could hang out with, and what I was supposed to think. For half of this decade, I wasn’t my own person. I wasn’t myself. I had no way of being myself because I wasn’t given the space to learn who I was. I was the person he made me into. He gradually isolated me from family and friends. I had no one to rely on but him.

In 2015, after a year and a half of seminary, I was finally developing some of my own ideas, and those ideas began to reveal what a terrible situation I was in. I wanted out, but I didn’t know how to escape. My way out finally came, but only with more trauma. My first sexual assault ended my abusive relationship because I was blamed for cheating. My abusive partner doubted my story and became more angry than I had ever seen him. I knew then that I couldn’t do it anymore. I dealt with the fall out of my break up and the recovery from my assault at the same time. I still look back on that semester with amazement at how I made it through.

Things eventually began to turn around. I fell in love with a partner who treated me with respect and equality. I graduated from seminary. I found my first job doing something I loved. Just as things began to shift, though, they fell apart again. Last Thanksgiving, I was sexually assaulted for the second time. This compounded my trauma and left me with Complex PTSD. Instead of dealing with my symptoms, I pushed them down. I told myself that if I never thought about the assault, I could pretend that it didn’t happen.

All of this compounded trauma finally came to a head in the spring of 2019. I had started self harming again for the first time in 15 years. I was drinking more than I should’ve. I was lying to myself and everyone around me about how I was doing. I reached a point where I couldn’t do it anymore. I wanted out. My anxiety and depression were overwhelming, and I felt trapped. On May 21, 2019, I attempted suicide. Thankfully, I wasn’t successful. My roommate drove me to the hospital and I spent a week in the hospital followed by six weeks in an intensive trauma program.

I finally began to face the trauma of my assaults, my abuse, and the loss of my mother in early childhood. I realized how lonely I had been for most of my life. I finished the program on wobbly legs but ready with the tools I needed to live. My body was able to leave the state of emergency it had been in for years and finally breathe. It hasn’t been simple. A lot of days are still hard. There are mornings I have to choose to use the tools I learned in order to get out of bed. There are moments when I struggle not to blame myself for my assaults. There are times when all I can do is feel my emotions and cry. But I’m doing it.

I don’t know what this next decade holds, but I know it has to be better. I bought a house with my partner a month ago and we’re looking toward a future together. I’m writing more and becoming more serious about working toward publication. I’m dreaming with a friend about opening a bookstore full of adoptable cats. I know that making this new decade brighter will be work, but for the first time in years I feel equipped for the task.

Happy New Year. Happy new decade. Morning is coming.

Relapse

Posted on by Brenna Lakeson in body image, feminism, mental illness, relationships, sex, sexuality

*TW*: sexual assault, self harm

A little over a year ago, I relapsed into a pattern of self-harm. Right after Thanksgiving last year, I spent the whole night on the phone with the crisis help line and watching Queer Eye with my roommate while waiting to hear from my therapist. I took nearly a week off of work.

I had struggled with self harm in the past. During high school, I saw a therapist for it. But I had been clean for over 12 years. I felt devastated and disappointed. I grieved what I saw as my ruined success. I didn’t understand why I had ruined my sobriety and pulled myself back under into a habit that I knew would be difficult to break again. There was a reason, though. There is always a reason we do what we do, even if it’s not evident. Usually, we’re reacting to life around us, especially when it has to do with trauma.

Last year, I survived a sexual assault right around Thanksgiving. Much like my first experience of sexual assault, my perpetrator was someone I knew. I’d had some drinks and still don’t remember much of what happened. It was so similar to my first assault, in fact, that I started to believe that everything was my fault. How could this happen twice? Maybe I was the one to blame.

If you’re thinking the same thing, I have a few things to say. First, survivors are never to blame. I own 0% of the blame for what happened to me. My perpetrator is the only one at fault. Second, people under the influence of alcohol or drugs that cannot remember what happened to them are not able to legally consent to any sexual activity. And, perhaps most importantly, there is never a reason or excuse for rape. I could be passed out drunk and naked in someone’s bed and it still would not give them the right to my body. My body is mine and only mine, and if I am not able to say a coherent “yes”, then I am saying “no.”

Before I was able to fully own this more freeing narrative, though, I packed down my shame. I didn’t talk about my assault. I believed that if I never thought about it, I might be able to forget that it had happened. I sort of mentioned it to my therapist once. I didn’t tell my partner or my best friend. I ignored my flashbacks and wrote off my spiked anxiety. And while I might’ve cognitively been able to forget somewhat, my body would not forget what happened to her. She knew what violation felt like and she was crying out for help. This is where the self harm came from.

While it seems contradictory to those who have never experienced it, self harm is often an attempt at control. Much like an eating disorder, self harm feels like it allows someone to control the pain that’s happening to them when they don’t feel like they can control emotional pain. Sometimes self harm occurs out of anger. Sometimes out of sadness. Sometimes loneliness. It’s safe to say that I felt a combination of all of those things. I felt angry at myself, sad that I felt imprisoned by this experience, and lonely because I was bearing it without any help.

Because I continued to box up and stuff down my memories of the rape, I ended up hospitalized last spring. And during my partial hospitalization, I was finally able to share my story. I grieved for days afterward. I had so many pent up emotions about it that it was overwhelming. But the release was what I needed to move forward.

I still struggle, though. I currently have 35 days clean. At one point in my healing journey, I had two months clean. So, all of this is still fresh, but I am beyond proud of the steps I’ve made. Each clean day is a victory. When I relapse, I have not started from the beginning again. Instead, I learn how to heal in an imperfect way and keep going.

Trauma Therapy III: Leaving the Hole

Posted on by Brenna Lakeson in body image, death, family, LGBTQ+, mental illness, relationships, religion, sex, sexuality

This is part III of a III part blog. If you haven’t read part I, read it first by clicking here. If you haven’t ready part II, read it by clicking here.

Once I reached the bottom of the hole, it was difficult to pick myself back up and find my way out. Everything was painful, but the pain had become comfortable. I was used to being raw. I didn’t know how to fold up the mess and prepare to get back to my life. My everyday life had become so encased in reviewing my trauma that I wasn’t sure how to go about my daily life anymore. I had done the work, but now I had to actually recover.

When I was hospitalized, I could tell the day I started feeling better because I started straightening up the common room. For nearly a week, I floated around, not particularly caring about myself or my surroundings. But two days before I was released, I threw out old papers that had piled up, organized the crayons and coloring books, and put all of the remotes in a little basket. That was the moment I knew that I was getting back to normal. While sometimes my obsessive organizing can be a negative sign, here it pointed to the fact that I was getting back to normal. The same was true in PHP/IOP but in a different way: I started mentoring other women.

New women arrived in the program each day, and I watched them go through the same phases I had experienced. When I saw them fighting the process, I called them out. When I saw them willing to be vulnerable, I celebrated. My recovery was no longer just about me but about the women around me as well. My therapist relied on me and other “old-timers” in the group to help guide new women who needed to let go and trust the process. I began to see that I knew everything the program had to offer, and that, if I stayed too much longer, I would start to go backwards.

This happens pretty often in recovery programs like the women’s trauma program at Ridgeview. We reach the bottom of the dark hole, we claw back out, and then we’re not sure what to do. For me, I was too afraid to enter back into real life, so I started crawling back into the hole again. The hole was painful, but at least I knew my way around in there. It seemed like a kind of strange Stockholm syndrome where my trauma was holding me captive. I started to feel comfortable in the misery and resisted returning to my old rhythms. I was different now and didn’t know how to negotiate daily life with my new tools. I knew how to negotiate trauma therapy, though, so I held tight to it as long as I could.

On my last day of the program, I cried constantly. I have always been a sentimental person, so I knew I would be upset about leaving all the women who had been on this journey with me. But it wasn’t just that. I was terrified. I didn’t know if I could do it. I knew I had tools and I had done recovery work to prepare me for being on my own, but I was afraid I was going to fail. I was scared that without the daily support of Ridgeview, I would end right back up where I started. What I didn’t realize was that, even when I messed up, it was impossible for me to go back to the place I had been in before.

Recovery isn’t linear but it isn’t circular either. Even when you mess up, you’re moving forward. Each time I relapse into self harm or have suicidal thoughts, I’m still learning about how to overcome those urges. Each time I have a panic attack, I make it through and I’m reminded that it will end. There are plenty of bad days, but each one makes me stronger. Everything that has happened in the past brings me to where I am now, so even though I’ve had difficult moments since Ridgeview, I can’t go back to where I was in May. I’m not the same.

The hole is still there, and there will always be more to work through, more to sit in. In fact, I am sitting in it right now. But the goal is to not avoid the hole for so long that it overflows again. I now have the tools to clean out the dark hole as I go. I will still be angry along the way. I will still sit and sob at night. But I’ve also witnessed my own strength and know that I can make it to morning.

Trauma Therapy II: Sitting In It

Posted on by Brenna Lakeson in death, family, mental illness, relationships, religion, sex, sexuality

This is part II of a III part blog. If you haven’t read part I, read it first by clicking here.

After about a week of trauma therapy in PHP, the work finally began. I stopped resisting and started being honest with myself about my experiences. I stopped trying to do everything right and started trying to tell the truth. Through this, I realized that the reasons I thought I’d been hospitalized weren’t really the reasons I’d been hospitalized. The things that I thought had tipped me over the edge were only the topsoil in a deep and messy hole. And the only way out was to sit in the hole and get dirty.

Because I had been in survival mode for so long, actually feeling my emotions was exhausting. I don’t like for people to see me upset and I don’t like to be vulnerable, but trauma therapy was requiring me to do both of those things basically all the time. After a day or two of this, I told my therapist that I felt like there was a gaping wound in the middle of my chest and the only way to feel safe was to curl up in a ball. She said, “What are you afraid is going to happen? You’re safe.” I wasn’t sure what I thought was going to happen if I let go and sat in it. In retrospect, I think it was the actual letting go that I was so afraid of. I had built my life around hanging on in order to survive. I thought I would lose myself. I thought the darkness would take me over. I thought my grief and trauma and shame would eat me alive. But, in reality, it had already tried and I had escaped.

I cried for a week. I cried constantly in group even if I wasn’t the one sharing. I bought frozen and prepackaged meals at the grocery store because I could barely manage to eat, much less cook. I laid in my bed and cried myself to sleep every night, overwhelmed by the amount of emotions I was finally allowing myself to feel. Plus, the loneliness of knowing that no one else can help you with your feelings is probably the most destitute I’ve ever felt. Some days, I felt ok during PHP because I knew others around me felt the same way. It was often when I left that I felt the most overwhelmed. When it was time to go home, what was I supposed to do? The answer was: nothing. I just had to sit there and feel terrible. I felt lonely and sad and overwhelmed, and you just feel it. I felt homesick for something I couldn’t identify and entirely umoored. And when I felt like drinking or hurting myself or ending it all just to make the feelings stop, I called someone to sit with you. And kept feeling.

After about a week of feeling all of this, I remember asking my therapist, “How long do I have to sit it in? How do I know when I’m done?” She looked at me and said, “I’m still sitting in it.” There will always be things I need to sit in and feel. It will probably never be as overwhelming as the second week of trauma therapy because I aim to never get to a point again where I have decades worth of built up trauma to process, but there will always be something. No one else could tell me when I was done sitting in it. I just knew. One night, I looked at a picture of my mom and sobbed for hours. After that I knew I had reached the bottom of the cave and it was time to find my way back out.

To be continued in part III…

Trauma Therapy I: Anger and Release

Posted on by Brenna Lakeson in body image, death, family, feminism, LGBTQ+, mental illness, relationships, sex, sexuality

When I was first released from my week in an inpatient hospitalization program, I felt better. I thought I had figured out the reasons I fell so far off the edge and believed I had the all the tools I needed to start again. My problem, I thought, was that I had failed to properly use my support system. I had plenty of people who loved me and cared for me, but my perfectionism had been preventing me from letting them in to help. While this was true, this was far from the root of the problem.

Upon my release, I agreed to attend a Partial Hospitalization Program (PHP). Literally the day after being discharged from the hospital, I had to show up at the same hospital again and keep talking about my feelings. I didn’t think I needed to be there. My first day, I thought, “I’m way more well adjusted than everyone else. I’m fine. I’ll be out of here in a snap.” (Spoiler alert: nope.) That’s the thing about trauma, though, is that it tricks us into believing we’re fine. Rather, our maladaptive coping strategies trick us into believing we’re fine because it’s the only way we know how to survive. I entered into the Women’s Trauma PHP assuming I didn’t have any work left to do. But I was about to do the hardest work of my life.

The first three days of PHP, I played my perfected role of “good student.” I didn’t disrupt, I listened, I responded when asked but only when asked, I took notes, I was friendly to the other participants. I knew all the answers. However, I had no intention of digging in, asking hard questions, or being vulnerable. I thought if I said all the right things and filled out my daily behavior log consisting of no urges to harm myself or others, I could get out of there and get back to my life. I stressed constantly about when I would be able to go back to work. The more “good” I was, the sooner I could leave. Trauma therapists, though, see right through that shit. So, around day 4, my therapist starting pushing my buttons. Our therapists often discussed how the trauma program would trigger us so we could learn how to deal with our triggers in a healthy environment, but they also emphasized that this triggering was not intentional. It just happened as a part of being vulnerable and interacting with others. However, my shell was so tightly encased, that I have a feeling my therapist had no choice but to grab a stick and poke the bear.

I’m funny when I get angry. Most people yell, become aggressive, or get physically aggitated. I sulk. I think a lot of my issues with anger come from both the fact that I’ve experienced the pain that misdirected anger can cause and also from my relentless Good Girl Syndrome. Because I’ve experienced emotional abuse, I don’t want my anger to ever feel that way to anyone else. In addition, angry outbursts seem like a form of losing control, and if I keep my anger dialed down, I’ll still be able to be perfect. It turns out, though, I’m SUPER angry. If you know anything about the Enneagram, this really shouldn’t be surprising. I’m a 1, and we’re notoriously the most angry number. But we keep our anger boxed up inside to seem measured and controlled.

This is what I did in PHP. For several days, I sat in the corner of each lecture and therapy session refusing to make eye contact and refusing to participate. The program was making me angry. The people were making me angry. My therapist was making me angry. And I was in such a delicate state that it was getting harder and harder to keep all my anger controlled. My second Friday in PHP, I told my friend in the program, “I’m never coming back here.” Later we laughed about it, but at the time I was serious. Anger is the gateway to so many other emotions, like grief and shame, so it’s where many of us start our trauma work. The minute we started to feel angry, the minute our therapist knew she was finally getting somewhere.

I finally moved past my anger the day I shared in group therapy. I had shared in group before, but never anything actually vulnerable. The longer I sat in the program, though, the more I realized that, in order to begin my true healing process, I would have to share some things that I hadn’t shared with anyone. I was terrified. Every day as I sat in group, it pressed harder and harder on me that I wasn’t going to get through this program if I didn’t start being vulnerable. I would rehearse what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it when I was falling asleep at night. I didn’t even know how to make the words because I had spent so long trying to pretend that this particular thing hadn’t happened to me that I had started to forget about it. The fact that I had kept it shoved down for so long, though, was a huge source of my trauma.

One morning, I finally decided to share. I think, probably, I was so exhausted from being angry that I figured I had no choice but to let go and actually work the program. As I shared, I stared at the table in front of me, tears dripping off of my face, my breathing shallow, my hands clamped together in my lap. I felt no better, in fact I probably felt worse, but I had done it. Next came the worst part. The sitting in it. Our program therapist was very fond of telling us to “sit in it.” Because of my maladaptive coping strategies that I used to survive years of trauma, I had forgotten how to feel negative feelings and just feel them. Most trauma survivors, upon feeling negative feelings, use behaviors like substance abuse, self harm, avoidance, partying, or over working when we start to feel this way. We spend most of our time just trying to stay alive. In PHP, our therapist challenged us to feel without relying on these behaviors. She told us we were in a safe place to feel all of these emotions: we had mental health professionals around us all the time and we had a built in support system if we were unable to handle the feelings. The only way out was through.

(to be continued in a part II – there’s a lot to cover here, y’all. stay tuned.)

One Year Queeriversary

Posted on by Brenna Lakeson in family, feminism, LGBTQ+, politics, relationships, sex, sexuality, social justice, theology

One year ago on July 3, 2018, I came out publicly for the first time. Even though I felt ready and had been waiting for that moment for over a decade, I still felt terrified. I remember writing my coming out post on the couch in my living room and being unable to hit “publish.” Eventually, I had to close my eyes, take a deep breath, and click.

Life has been a tangle of messes since last July, only some of them related to queerness. I just finished my partial hospitalization mental health program and am trying to integrate back into my everyday routine. I feel a combination of devastation and rage every day while I watch children get caged, women dismissed, trans women killed, and black voices silenced. I constantly wonder if I’m doing enough to help us overcome all this darkness. I’ve endured some difficult family conflict through cycles of anger and silence. In some ways, living my life as an out queer person has been a drop in the ocean.

In other ways, though, the luxury of being myself in the midst of all this roughness has made it more manageable. Last fall, I experienced Pride for the first time as an out person (Pride in Atlanta is in October…it’s a long story). I made my partner take pictures of me on every corner and wore every rainbow, sparkly thing I could fit on my body. I knew the queer community was bearing it’s own struggles – inclusion of trans voices, inclusion of POC, rallying around a central goal post-marriage-equality. But it was all to sparkly and new to me for any of that to tarnish the rainbows in my eyes. I was queer and you couldn’t shut me up. It was beautiful.

In the wake of my coming out, I received message upon message from other closeted people from every corner of my life. People I hadn’t spoken to in weeks or years contacted me to say, “Thank you for reminding me that I’m not alone.” My own long and arduous journey to being comfortable with my bisexuality was brought to mind as I talked with people who were still struggling to hold queerness and Christianity at the same time. It made me feel like, even though I was a baby queer, I still had valuable things to say to my community.

The past year, though, has also challenged my self worth in profound ways. In February, I the General Conference live stream at work day after day, waiting for my church to decide its fate. In the end, the United Methodist Church chose exclusion over love. As I watched the final count of votes project onto the screen, I fell to the floor in my kitchen, sobbing. I had given hours and years of my time and thousands of dollars to an institution that I believed could support me in making the world a better place. But instead of acceptance, what I received in return was pain and rejection. Many of my queer Methodist friends and allies remain in the church, and I am so grateful for their continued work to change this broken system from the inside. Right now, though, I am too tired and hurt to give any more energy to an institution that refuses to ordain me and the people I love. Right now, I can’t fight anymore. I am angry. I need a place where my personhood will not be up for debate. I haven’t found that home yet, but I know it’s out there.

Being out for a year has been a roller coaster, but I am most thankful for the small things. My freedom to post memes about bisexuality on Twitter, the bi flag in my pencil cup at work, my t-shirt that says “Jesus was Bi.” I don’t have to pretend to be an ally anymore. I am free to stand up and say, “These things apply to me. This community is mine too.” While my life is not nearly as risky or revolutionary, I feel a kinship this season with Marsha P. Johnson and her contemporaries – tired of being told who to be and where to stand, in pain but able to fight injustice, imperfect but willing to throw up my hands and say “I’m here and you can’t get rid of me.”

Psych Ward

Posted on by Brenna Lakeson in body image, death, LGBTQ+, mental illness, relationships, religion, sex, sexuality, social justice

*tw: mental illness, hospitalization, suicide, self harm, sexual assault*

At the end of May, I spent a week in an inpatient psychiatric hospital. While I don’t feel comfortable sharing the specifics of what led me to be admitted, I was admitted involuntarily, meaning I did not walk in off the street and decide I needed care. Instead, I had reached my saturation point for handling life’s variables and healthcare providers determined I would be safest in a hospital setting. I never thought I would need to be hospitalized, but in retrospect, I’m suprised it took me this long. I can now see warning signs in myself all over the place, but I wasn’t listening to them.

Late on the Monday night before Memorial Day, I sobbed in the car as my roommate drove me to the emergency room. I texted my boss and my therapist and called my partner, but I remember very little after that. I spent the night in Emory University’s ER, attempting to watch Sex in the City and drifting in and out of conciousness as we waited for the rotating psychiatrist to come and evaluate me. Around 5:30am, my partner left to go home and rest. Around 6:30am, the psychiatrist finally arrived. I talked with him for a few minutes, answering questions about what brought me to the ER, my medical and psychiatric history, and how I was feeling. Not long after, the attending nurse told me I was being taken to a psychiatric hospital. They assured me they would find one that would accept my insurance. I was loaded onto a stretcher and into an ambulance with no specific idea about where I was headed. I was terrified and exhausted, and I slept the whole ride.

When we arrived, I was unloaded along with my backpack I had somehow managed to bring along. Still in blue papery hospital scrubs, I sat scrunched up in an armchair alone in an intake room for what felt like hours, waiting to be processed into the hospital. Eventually, I was able to put my own clothes back on and use my phone to text a few people to tell them where I was. I wrote down important phone numbers so I would still have them after they could confiscate my phone. They took my bookbag as well, and it would be two days before I could get the rest of my things out of it. I was taken to a section of the hospital that I now know is primarily for people who are psychotic, delusional, aggressive, or paranoid. I didn’t fit any of these categories, but the women’s trauma unit I was eventually bound for was full, so I was stuck in holding until there was an open bed.

I walked around for three days in a complete fog. I’m sure the sleeping medications didn’t help, but as the reality of what was happening set in, I began to feel less and less in control of my body. I had panic attacks and cried constantly. I had no idea what was going on. I felt entirely alone. I wanted so badly to process what had happened but felt I had no one to talk to. I watched people get shots of sedatives to calm them after having raging outbursts. I watched one man try to escape twice in one day. I watched another walk around wearing only one shoe, in a psychotic daze for 48 hours until they corrected his medication and he became a completely stable person. I was scared and I had no clue how to move forward.

On day 3, I finally had visitation hours. Seeing my partner and my best friend was both jarring and comforting. They said they were surprised at how good I looked and seemed. Looking back, this is especially strange because of how out of control I felt. All of my defense mechanisms to keep my life together had finally failed. My perfectionism, my obsessive cleaning and organizing, my intellectualization of my problems, and my avoidance of conflict and difficult emotions had all worked for a long time. But the thing about defense mechanisms is that they work until they don’t. I avoided digging deeply into myself for so many decades that I started to believe I could forget that certain things had happened to me by simply not acknowledging them. (Spoiler: This does not work.) I was dishonest with myself and the people who love me about how I was really doing because I was ashamed of the pain I was actually feeling, and, at times, completely unaware of the pain I was actually feeling.

I started to unwrap all of this once I was moved from the chaotic holding unit to the women’s trauma unit. I was surrounded by women who shared my diagnoses and my life experiences. We never discussed specifics, but we just knew. It was such a relief to get hugs from other women after not having any physical contact for days in the other unit. I started to smile and laugh again. “This isn’t the psych ward!” we would yell across the table at each other, as we color pictures of mandalas and animals with dulling colored pencils. We laughed because there was no other way we could make it through. Because we were in the psych ward. And our reality pressed in from all sides as we walked around in our pants without drawstrings and shoes without laces. Our backs ached from mattresses without springs and our eyes were tired from the wellness checks every 15 minutes during the night to make sure we were breathing. It was an overwhelming week. It was a week I never thought I’d have. But it was real, and now it’s a part of my story.

Since being released, I’ve been participating in a partial hospitalization program for women’s trauma. It’s possibly the most difficult work I’ve ever done. I’m not quite ready to share my reflections on the work I’ve been doing in trauma therapy yet because it’s still so close and because I’m still doing it. But I wanted to at least share the beginning of this journey. I want to share this experience because I want to help normalize psychiatric care. Inpatient hospitalization programs are for everyone. If you feel out of control of your emotions, a situation, substance abuse, or your behaviors, admitting yourself to a program like the one I was in could be a helpful step. Inpatient programs help stabilize you in moments of crisis. Getting help before you’re in a full blown crisis is also a valid reason to seek hospitalization.

I’m getting better, but I can’t say I’m getting better every day because that would be a lie. Healing is not linear. I’m learning new ways to cope and some days I use those new coping skills effectively, but other days I don’t. I’m back at work part time, but I’m teaching my self to take it easy. I’m scared to integrate back into “real life”, but I know that I’ll be ready when it’s time. I’m still not sure what all I’m supposed to have learned from the psych ward, but I trust that I’m learning it.

The Monogamous Bisexual

Posted on by Brenna Lakeson in family, LGBTQ+, relationships, sex, sexuality

*disclaimer: Polyamory is a valid and wonderful way to live in relationship. This post is not meant to shame polyamorous people or relationships. It is often assumed all bisexuals/pansexuals are polyamorous, and I’m writing to debunk that myth from my own experience.*

People get really confused about what it means to be bisexual. People get especially confused about what it means to be bisexual in a relationship with someone of the opposite gender.

“Aren’t you just straight now?”

“But you’re not, like, a practicing bisexual.”

“Are you still going to claim that label if you marry a man?”

There is so much to misunderstand. Many straight people I’ve encountered, especially those who don’t have any queer friends, assume that the only valid way to be bisexual is to be polyamorous. Some bi’s are polyamorous. Some bi’s are not. All of us are bi no matter who our patner(s) is(are).

I am monogamous. I don’t plan to ever have relationships with multiple people at once because it’s just not for me. I love my partner dearly, and I hope to spend the rest of our lives together. I’m not interested in forming relationships with anyone else. For me, it’s enough work to try to communicate with and love one person. Between maintaining my own mental health and doing the emotionally draining job of working at a social service agency, I don’t have the energy to put into multiple romantic relationships. For some, having multiple partners is freeing. For me, it would feel like a burden. Either way, my sexuality stands on its own.

If I am dating a man, I’m not suddenly straight. If I’m dating a woman, I’m not suddenly a lesbian. My sexual orientation is independent of my partner. Being bisexual/pansexual means that I hold the possibility of being attracted to people of any gender. Just like any straight woman loves to look at a good picture of Ryan Reynolds or David Beckham, I’m not immune to attraction because I’m in a relationship. People who are partnered still find other people attractive. If you’re married to a man, you are not only attracted to that one man ever in the history of the world. You’ve probably dated other men before. You’ve probably checked out the biceps on that guy at the gym. You probably saw Magic Mike. As a heterosexual person, you say “I’m attracted to men.” You don’t say, “I’m attracted to Steve,” as though you’ve never been attracted to another man in your entire life.

Being bisexual is exactly like that except the possibilities are more diverse. Maybe I find a leading lady in a movie attractive. Maybe I think the guy in line in front of me at Target is cute. These things have nothing to do with my commitment to my current partner. Anyone who tells you they’ve never found anyone else besides their partner attractive is straight up lying to you. Being bisexual means I get to lean over to my straight, male partner while we watch a TV show and say “she’s cute” while he nods back to me. It doesn’t mean I’m unable to commit to my partner. It just means there’s a greater diversity in who I might be attracted to.

I’ve struggled a lot lately to find monogamous bisexual role models. Again, this is not shade toward my beautiful, amazing, polyamorous bisexual friends. You keep doing you. But it can make me feel alone, like I’m the only bisexual who wants to be monogamous. It can make me feel like I’m doing it wrong. So, if you’re like me, the monogamous bisexual, let me say for all of us, there is no way to do your sexuality wrong. It’s your sexuality. You claim it however it works for you. For me, this means knowing that I’m attracted to people of all genders, that I identify as queer, but that I fully and deeply love my cis, male partner and only him. For others, it might mean loving multiple partners, for another it might mean dating a couple, for another it might mean being in an open marriage. Find out how your sexuality works best for you and your partner(s). Celebrate who you are and know that there is no wrong way to be you.