lesbian relationship necromancy
on getting back together
the summer of 2019 was pretty fucking awful. not every minute, of course there were good parts, but the bad part was that my girlfriend broke up with me. my otherwise really great three and a half year relationship ended after about two weeks of fighting that was world-crushing. there was a lot of anger from what i came to understand as the clashing of attachment trauma. any emotional response from me was met with a freeze response from my girlfriend. i was being honest about my needs and asking her to be more emotionally supportive of me when the worst case scenario happened—she admitted that she couldn’t be what i needed, she told me she had been lying to me about her feelings, and said that i was asking for too much (words most feared by those of us who never ask for anything). the experience of thinking you are on the same page as someone and then finding out you aren’t is uniquely devastating to me because of the concealment of truth, a foundational upheaval.
when i say that trust is very important to me, it’s like “right, for whom isn’t trust important?” but i’m very interested in honesty as a way to build something better. i use the phrase “radical honesty” even though i do not believe that honesty should be radical—i think the telling of our truths should be woven into our fiber. that’s really fucking hard when there’s a lot in this world that dulls us and keeps us from knowing ourselves and sharing it with others, which is where the problems with honesty arise. my personal hurdles with honesty stem from childhood trauma about taking up space and scarcity, so believe me when i say i have so much compassion for all of us healing from the ways the world teaches us to shrink.
because i love math, i imagine that everyone has their own trust equation. we subconsciously plug in variables that tell us if someone can be trusted. one of my variables is a feeling in my body; the pit of my stomach warns me that something’s not right. if i don’t trust someone, my body tenses and i feel calculated. i collect data points to add and multiply for an integrity score. have their actions aligned with they believe (or what they told me they believe)? do they act from a place of fear? do they act out in fear?
as a kid, every time my parents betrayed me it was a data point for why they were terrible people. i have long assigned morality to things like lying, trust, and integrity, but i have come to understand that morality, like everything else, is fake. we are flawed humans and even people that are trustworthy mess up. there have been people who have broken my trust who i removed from my life (hi, dad), and there have been people who i allowed to stick around and get a second (or third) chance. why do we tolerate some people’s fuck ups, but part ways with others? i don’t think this can be answered with a subconscious math equation. i used to believe all the bullshit about time healing all wounds, and that time is the great counselor, but i know now that, like morality, time is also fake. wounds left untreated become infected.
in horror film pet sematary (1989, one of my favorite childhood movies), there’s a creepy burial ground in the woods where the dead come back to life. when a child dies tragically, the father buries him in the mystical graveyard just beyond the pet cemetery. the elderly neighbor who showed him the spot warns him with a line i will always remember—“they come back wrong.” the buried child, gage, soon returns to the family as promised, very wrong. he comes back to life but now he’s evil, the classic tradeoff. horror ensues. for some reason this movie has had a lasting impression on me, stephen king taught me my first of many lessons on the dangers of necromancy. things that die should stay dead. you get one try and any attempt at resurrection is just damned.
it took two weeks for my then ex-girlfriend to contact me to tell me she had made a mistake. i felt validated and i was interested in listening to what she had to say. there are a lot of details i’m leaving out of this story because they aren’t for me to share, but she didn’t remember a lot of what had happened and, like me, was very confused. before our breakup she hadn’t been talking to me, she wasn’t sharing important feelings with me and that was not acceptable, especially in the context of our power dynamic relationship. when we finally talked, she apologized and said that she would like to fix things and get back together. i remember that i felt her apology in my gut and i believed that she was genuinely sorry. i wanted that too, but needed her to understand the gravity of the situation from my point of view. this break in trust meant we couldn’t just hug it out and everything would go back to normal.
the spell for lesbian relationship necromancy would have us write down our grievances in blood, bury them deep in the dirt on the full moon, then lock ourselves inside for seven days having makeup sex. by the time we reemerge our orgasm energy will have risen our relationship from the dead. but i knew the dangers of necromancy, how things come back wrong. we needed the opposite of a burial, we needed an excavation.
an excavation meant digging everything up, hollowing out the thing, and laying it bare. we started over from nothing but muscle memory, like the constant pangs of déjà vu—we’ve been here before maybe, but different. we had a first date, a first kiss, all over again.
it took roughly five months for my ex-girlfriend to become my girlfriend again. one of those months we were completely no contact to reset and wean off of talking every day. i set a lot of boundaries around what i was comfortable with. i didn’t allow her to do any service for me, which is very intimate and requires a lot of trust. i asked her to give me more information than what she thought was necessary so that she could get in the habit of sharing her thoughts and feelings more often. it was like a firehose on full blast that was adjusted accordingly once the fire died down. eventually my body told me it was safe again, i relaxed and breathing came easy, trust finally crept back in.
it was a few more months until i felt ready to reintroduce the power exchange aspect of our relationship. the hardest part for me was not allowing us to slip back into this dynamic before it felt safe. i spent the day searching the city for a hunter green hanky to give her, the effort it took to find one somehow felt right. i raced to her house and asked her to get down on her knees and presented her with the folded bandana she had earned. “i’m ready to be your daddy again.” when she looked up at me, she was crying happy tears.
allowing someone to stay in your life after they have hurt you is not easy. i could have just as easily dragged my broken heart and anger into the room, said no, and kept on moving. i often wonder why i agreed to this when i knew it would be hard for both of us and the odds for failure were high. it’s because our history together was full of love. it’s because, as her dominant, the responsibility i felt to protect her didn’t just disappear when we broke up. it’s because she showed up and named what was hers to fix. it’s because she admitted she didn’t know how, and then she started looking for answers and sorting out where to begin. it’s because she did it for herself first. it’s because she did so much work even though i made it very clear that getting back together was only a possible, not definite, outcome. she knew that it might take a very long time for me to trust her again, but i promised that i would try.
when answers you need suddenly appear on your twitter feed it’s like a millennial version of bible dipping. as such, i recently discovered the practice of self-accountability as an alternative/precursor to community accountability. i have known this as a concept generally, but not as it relates to popular accountability processes. i linked to other articles about this in a previous newsletter, but it keeps coming up for me. learning about the process of constantly holding yourself accountable as a way to mitigate the harm that we all cause has given me language to understand who i trust and who gets access to second chances.
self-accountability is kind of hard to describe, and that’s probably why i like it. the model of accountability we’re used to hearing about is much more tangible—the person harmed sets terms for how the person who did the harm can make things better. there might even be other people involved to make sure the person is doing the things on the list. i’m not an expert, but what i’ve learned so far is that self-accountability is an ongoing practice that gets integrated into everything you do. you check yourself to make sure your actions align with your values. you check your friends to make sure they’re checking you on if your actions align with your values. if you’re misaligned, you change your actions or you do everything you can to get the help to change them.* this poses the question—would we even need a group of people holding someone to terms of accountability if that person was first accountable to themselves?
(*i also learned through all of this from a very smart friend that there is a kind of trauma that’s held in our bodies, and some people might not be able to change no matter how much they want to without a practice of healing the body.)
it has been an evolution from death, to excavation, to reanimation. i jokingly refer to it as relationship 2.0, but that’s actually quite accurate. there’s a new normal that took a long time to cultivate, but it’s present and grounded and embodied. i don’t know the exact equation for how to build back trust in a relationship, but i do know that it has a lot to do with starting over, self-accountability, patience, and good faith (and craniosacral therapy tbh).
most of the time when plants die it’s due to overwatering; the soil isn’t able to dry out and the roots rot and turn to mush. if you’re lucky you can save a dying plant before it’s too late by creating propagations of surviving leaves. you simply cut away at what’s rotting and place what’s salvageable in water to regrow. sometimes the surviving clippings take a really long time to grow new roots. they might need special attention to make sure they survive. every time i have successfully saved a plant, the new version is that much more resilient to have weathered a small death.