Hello dear ones,
Before I get into the writing for today’s newsletter, I wanted to share the most exciting news!! Introducing….
As you probably know, I’m passionate about community building and I wanted to create a space where folks can connect with other humans living with and healing from trauma.
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This writing comes from my forthcoming book manuscript, Touch Me, I’m Sick (more info to come soon!!!) in a chapter entitled “Femme4Femme Intimacy.”
“What is broken in me Varia? Why am I spiralling?”
Earlier that day, I’d reached out to one of my besties, Varia, for some support. I’d found myself tapped back in an old obsession: the desire to fix the emotionally unavailable boy who just told me he thinks we should just be friends.
I’d been seeing Jasper for a month and things had been feeling super easy. We were having amazing T4T sex, made each other laugh a lot, and never ran out of things to talk about. I wasn’t sure if we’d be compatible in a long-term kind of way, but I was excited to find out. I thought the feeling was mutual, and so I was shocked when he told me that he was only having friend vibes.
Under normal circumstances, the end of a month-long casual connection would not have felt so all consuming. But the past few months of my life had felt like the Tower card in tarot: everything crumbling all around me. I launched a Kickstarter to fund the writing of this book when I found out that there was an Instagram account seeking to cancel me over vague claims and a refusal to engage with my accountability pod; and I’d just ended a four-year long partnership after realizing that I really needed to be with a queer and trans human. So this definitely wasn’t an ideal time to be starting a new relationship.
And yet, here I was, consumed by this desire to show Jasper that his lack of romantic feels was really just his body not knowing what secure attachment could feel like, and I would be the one to help him work through his attachment trauma.
Varia asks me if I really want her to answer my question: why am I obsessing over this human?
“Yes, yes I do.”
“You’re going through a major period of transformation in your life, some might even say a crisis. In order to not focus on all of this change, which is terrifying for your nervous system, your trauma brain has created a distraction. Do you really want to help this human work through his insecure attachment? Is that something you have the energy for right now?”
“Adult me doesn’t,” I respond. “But wow some other part of me sure does.”
“Whenever I become fixated on something or someone external to me, that’s a sign that I need to be turning my attention inwards. You’ve just ended a long-term relationship and are going to be moving to a new city. You need time to grieve and to focus on yourself.”
The resistance that I feel throughout my body at Varia’s advice tells me that she’s hit on something. When I’d talked to other friends about what happened with Jasper, they’d asked me “Do you really want to be with someone who isn’t ready to be with you?” To which my attachment trauma screamed YESSSSSSSS. But what I’d really needed to hear was “Are you ready to be with someone who hasn’t healed their attachment wounds?”
Suddenly I could feel the obsessive thoughts dissipate.
Later that night, my friend Olivia reads my chart for me. I’d reached out to them to figure out what was happening astrologically. There had to be some cosmic force at play to justify all of the chaos and upheaval in my life. I also wanted their insight into my attachment wounding.
“Venus is the planet that gets described as the mother and usually correlates to our early adolescence. How old were you when your mother died?” Olivia asks me.
“Eleven.”
“Right, and so you lost your mom right around the time that you started thinking about romantic relationships. The fact that Chiron is in your descendent means that you look outwards rather than inwards. You’re focused on others outside of yourself,” they tell me. “My guess is that you’d identify as having disorganized attachment. You’re going to experience lots of disappointment.”
Here I am, faced with two connections ending. All I want is to love deeply and be loved deeply. And I’m terrified that I’ll never find that kind of love. That I’ll always be searching.
It’s in these moments that I turn to my two best friends, fellow femmes Varia and Natalie. Not just for support. But for reminders that I’ve found the kind of love that I long for in my relationships with the two of them.
In her zine Soft Femme, my friend and fellow femme Andi Schwartz describes femmeships as something different from friendships with other femmes: “I understand femme connections as politically significant friendships that take the form of political alliances and communities of care.”
For Andi, “there is something distinctly femme about forming and valuing connections with others. In our masculinist, binary-obsessed society, independence is prized, while interdependence is seen as weak. Our desire for connection is called ‘crazy’ and ‘needy.’” And yet, “to be femme is to rely on each other.”
It is through these femmeships that I learnt what secure attachment was. Jessica Fern describes people with secure attachment as “experiencing a healthy sense of self and seeing themselves and their partners in a positive light.” For Fern:
“Their interpersonal experiences are deeply informed by their knowledge that they can ask for what they need and people will typically listen and willingly respond … A child with a secure attachment style will likely grow up into an adult who feels worthy of love and seeks to create meaningful, healthy relationships with people who are physically and emotionally available. [They’re] comfortable with intimacy, closeness and their need or desire for others. They don’t fear losing their sense of self or being engulfed by the relationship … securely attached people experience relational object constancy, which is the ability to trust in and maintain an emotional bond with people even during physical and emotional separation.”
These experiences were uncharted land to me prior to meeting Natalie and Varia in my early twenties. I hated myself, was terrified of asking for what I needed, and felt totally unworthy of love. I sought out human after human who could not be emotionally available. And I certainly had never felt object constancy. My life, and my relationships, had been built on the tumultuous foundations of insecure attachment. Chaos and turmoil were all I knew, and I sought them out again and again, especially when my relationships were going smoothly. I now understand all of the reasons why I needed to repeat this cycle.
Varia and Natalie opened up the door to a new world of relational intimacy that I had dreamed of but never thought was possible.
One of the amazing things about our brains is their neuroplasticity. Not having secure attachment in our developmental years doesn’t have to haunt us for all of our lives. We can rewire our neural pathways through earned secure attachment. That I learnt how to build secure attachment through my femmeships is not a coincidence.
Earned secure attachment is a femme super power because of what’s required: the desire to attune oneself to the other; a commitment to deeply listening to another’s story, which means holding space for their trauma and their pain; compassion and reverence for all that the other has done to survive; an understanding that caring for each other should always be consensual and reciprocal, and never framed as an obligation; and the capacity to meet to vulnerability with softness.
I recall all of the times that I called Natalie when I was home alone and heard a noise in the house. Since I was a teenager, I’d been terrified of being the victim of a home invasion. After seeing the movie Red Dragon when I was seventeen, I slept in a spare bed in my dad’s room. My father never asked me why I needed to do this. At the time, I felt grateful for his silence. I knew that if I told him about the stories keeping me up at night, he’d think I was crazy. And yet, his silence on my bedtime needs meant that he never asked me if I was okay; if perhaps I needed help.
In hindsight I recognize that his silence was his own survival strategy. As a single father who was beginning to experience the early signs of Lou Gehrig’s disease, raising two kids on his own was more than enough work. The last thing he needed was a daughter who believed that her whole family would be murdered in the middle of the night.
With Natalie, I got to practice giving voice to this fear: “I think there’s someone upstairs. I mean…I know that there’s no one upstairs, but…” Never once did she tell me that I was being crazy or irrational. “Okay, I’ll be right over and we can go upstairs together.” And if she couldn’t come over, she’d stay on the phone with me until I was sure I was safe.
Years of therapy later, I’ll come to realize that my fear of empty houses was just a stand in for a fear buried much deeper: the fear that my world would fall apart again, just as it did when my mother died. The killer that I was so afraid of was a stand in for my father. My disorganized attachment led me into his bedroom each night to sleep in that spare bed, just a few feet away from the man I was terrified of. In the end, I was the one who cared for myself night after night, until I was able to return to my own bed once again.
I think back to those nights where my fear of empty houses would lead me to call Natalie This time, I spoke my fears out loud: “I’ll always be abandoned. Nothing good can stay. There must be something wrong with me. I don’t deserve to be happy.” And she turned to me, with all of the softness and care and compassion that had been missing for so many years, and told me, “I can see why you’d be afraid of that. But that’s not going to happen this time. I’m not going anywhere.” With her words, Natalie gave me the missing experience I’d longed for growing up.
The missing experience is a term I learnt in a class on the evolution of somatic psychology with Kekuni Minton. Within each nervous system state – play, joy, depression; fight, flight, freeze, submit, attach-cry – there is a missing experience that shapes our beliefs, emotions, sensations, movement. These missing experiences include: a positive belief, the processing of an emotion, missing attachment experiences, resources that weren’t there, individuation and differentiation from our caregivers, and the enactment of defensive responses that didn't happen during the original trauma. The stories that we create about ourselves and the beliefs that we hold emerge out of the missing experience: it’s not okay to be sad; I must always take care of others; I am undeserving of love; the trauma isn’t over.
With Natalie, I replaced the negative belief of “I must be crazy for thinking that there’s a killer in the house” with “you are deserving of care – regardless of whether or not your thoughts are rational.” Instead of staying frozen in dissociation, intrusive thoughts, and panic, until I can eventually self-soothe my way out of them, I get to experience the co-regulating presence of someone who loves me, and I complete the stress cycle. Giving one another the missing experience feels like a femme tool because it requires us to be soft with each other and refuse to pathologize our inner landscapes.
I’ve had similar experiences with Varia. Last summer, while visiting Toronto, we went to Lake Ontario for a swim. When we got there in the morning, the beach was empty. As the day went on, and the beach became more populated, two young men and their dog sat nearby. Varia and I were deep in conversation when I felt myself starting to dissociate. The men had lit a joint and as the smell drifted over to us, I felt like I’d been taken back in time. I couldn’t figure out what had triggered this or what was even happening in my nervous system. Varia noticed that I was no longer feeling present and suggested that we pack up and go. All I could do was nod.
We walked back to the car with our arms linked through each other. Eventually words came back to me.
“Wow, as soon as I smelled weed, a part of me recognized how similar they looked to the boys I hung out with at the park where I was raped. Their clothes, the beers they were drinking, the joint in their hand.”
“I figured that might have been what happened,” Varia responds. “Is there anything else you need right now to feel safe?”
“Just knowing that we could leave, and that you’d initiated that when I totally shut down, really helped,” I told her.
Getting up and leaving wasn’t an option I had access to in the past. After I was raped, I stayed in a numbed out state of dissociation for years and years. I didn’t even realize that what had happened was rape because my understanding of consent was so narrow. Somewhere, inside of me, lived the knowledge that if you were high or drunk, you’d somehow “asked for it.” And so I told no one what had happened to me, which meant that no one could protect me. My ability to make different choices now, with the support of one of my best friends, is a profoundly healing experience. This is Femme4Femme intimacy.
We’re sitting in a darkened corner of a wine bar in Toronto’s Little Italy in the days between Christmas and New Years. Varia is in her signature leopard print and bright red lipstick. Natalie blends masculine and feminine together with her tomboy femme ensemble of skinny jeans, printed blouse, and eyebrow pencil. And I’ve selected one of my many 90s floral print dresses. As we all arrive, we ooh and ahh over each other’s sartorial choices.
We’ve come to exchange presents, but really we’ve come to celebrate each other and the fact that this is our tenth holiday season together. It doesn’t take long before Natalie suggests that we go around and share our reflections on each person’s growth over the last year. And it takes even less time before we’re holding each other’s hands, all crying and laughing simultaneously.
“It’s like we’re in an episode of Baroness Von Sketch,” Varia jokes through tears.
Three femmes, sitting around a table, telling each other how much we love one another while detailing each other’s emotional and psychic growth in between sips of bougie wine. And we wouldn’t have it any other way. We’ve seen each other through so many romantic and sexual relationships. The one constant is our connection. We all trust that truth. That our Femme4Femme4Femme love is forever.
I’ve read so many scholars writings on queer temporality and I find myself wanting a femme understanding of time. Instead of thinking about the past and the future, as is the focus of most queer discussions of time I’ve encountered, I want to think about duration.
For me, femme temporality is one that is invested in forever – but not in the “til death do us part” kind of way that has been romanticized by the cisheteronormative couple formation. Forever marks an intended duration, one’s intention to be in relation for as long as is possible.
I’m reminded of Billy-Ray Belcourt’s words in his poetry collection This Wound is a World: “the body is an assemblage, a mass of everyone who’s ever moved us, for better or for worse.” Foreverness, here is less about pledging to be a physical presence in each other’s lives forever. Instead, it is about honoring, in our hearts, the ways in which our love leaves an imprint, an ephemeral trace that never goes away.
Forever as in the Donna Lewis lyrics “I love you always forever. Near and far closer together. Everywhere I will be with you” but without the “everything I will do for you” because we’ve all been working hard on letting go of our codependent tendencies. Our forever is built on the soil of earned secure attachment.
Femme temporality also holds space for the foreverness of trauma. In the online healing spaces that I circulate it, I see how so many are invested in a narrative of healing that results in I-Am-Healed. Past tense. Healing journey over. I’m not the only one to reject this narrative. In her essay “Not Over It, Not Fixed, and Living a Life Worth Living: Towards an Anti-Ableist Vision of Survivorhood,” Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explains the dangers of believing in this past tense capital-h Healed:
“The idea that survivorhood is a thing to ‘fix’ or ‘cure,’ to get over, and that the cure is not only possible and easy but the only desirable option, is as common as breath. It’s a concept that has deep roots in ableist ideas that when there’s something wrong, there’s either cured or broken and nothing in between, and certainly nothing valuable in inhabiting a bodymind that’s disabled in any way. It’s also an idea that’s seductive to survivors. We went the pain, the trauma of surviving sexual abuse or assault to be over. Who wouldn’t?”
When we hold space for the fact that our trauma will always be with us, that there may be a foreverness to healing, then we can move away from the shame that we’re “not healed yet” and towards celebrating all of the ways that we have survived thanks to our brilliant trauma brains. These “survivor skills” as Piepzna-Samarasinha calls them, enable us “to imagine survivor futures where we are thriving but not cured.”
Within a femme temporality, we accept that our trauma will be with us forever. But its impacts on our bodyminds will ebb and flow like water. “Long after internal attachment bonds have been established,” Janina Fisher writes,
“clients and their trauma-related parts may still periodically suffer distress, still be vulnerable to depression and anxiety, and even have destructive impulses. Earned secure attachment provides a stable base that enables individuals to tolerate grief, loss, betrayal, and other stressful normal life experiences.”
This is where I am right now. I have securely attached relationships and and I am still having panic attacks, intrusive thoughts, and old attachment patterns resurface. I’m not sure if they’ll ever fully go away. But when they happen now, they do not derail me for hours, days, weeks, months. There is a foreverness to my trauma in this way.
And, also, the duration of my symptoms has shifted. I come back into my window of tolerance quicker and with greater ease. Because I’ve learnt how to tend to these scared parts of me. My femmeships taught me how.
Within Femme4Femme intimacies, I do not need to be over my trauma. I do not need to “evolve” into some human who is FullyHealed™. I get to be forever messy, forever traumatized, forever moving towards the queer utopia of my dreams. And I get to do that with the humans who love me, with the humans who’re also invested in a soft femme future.
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