My Lavender Haze 🩵

You can't be everything you want to be before your time

Did you know that there’s a reason people hug? I didn’t. But I do now.

Until way-too-recently, I honestly thought that hugs were like… a social ritual. A symbolic exchange between two people, used to signify the intellectual idea that they shared a connection, or were offering comfort, or to signify parting.

I just figured hugs were the same as handshakes and high-fives.

And then, after roughly my 347th session of EMDR therapy, one day, I hugged Mr. K, and was surprised to discover a feel-good cocktail of tingly sensations from my head to my toes.

I’m not talking about arousal, I’d felt that before. I just didn’t know there was potential for hugs to transmit… love.

I promise not everything about my life is as depressing as this. It’s actually kind of hard to communicate the discrepancies… If you want a better idea of what my love life actually feels like these days, you should be reading Sanctified. But if you want to know what it has taken for me to get there, you’re in the right place.

I believe that from an early age, my body learned to identify bonding chemicals as toxic. (So as not to interrupt your reading, I’ll link to that article at the end 👇🏻)

Remember how I said after our wedding night, it was all downhill? Having (mostly) saved myself for that night, and, being a person who believed hugs were a pragmatic social ritual, becoming sexually active as a newlywed was the first time in my adult life that my body was flooded with oxytocin, dopamine, and the like.

And no matter how much I consciously believed that I had finally found Prince Charming, that he was a good, kind man who loved me and wanted all the same things that I wanted and that he would never, ever leave me, my body and many of my subconscious beliefs were screaming bloody murder about the monster in the room.

And the harder I tried, the harder they fought. And the harder I fought.

Do you know what else releases bonding hormones? Pregnancy. Breastfeeding. Family picnics. Celebrating holidays. All. Poison.

So, through pursuing the course of a remarkable amount of medical testing, trial and error with medications of various sorts, and endless work with therapists from a myriad of disciplines, one day, I hugged Mr. K, and it felt… good.

It felt… safe. It felt… grounding. It felt… right.

I’ve seen a lot of discourse about trusting your gut, and if your body tells you that your partner is a ‘no’ then there must be a reason, that if you feel like there are red flags there definitely are, even if you can’t see them yet.

Those things may be true sometimes, but let me tell ya, if I had trusted my instincts, I would be in a very different place today, with little or no relevance to Mr. K’s actual weaknesses.

He does have some. He talks too long about things like in-depth politics during the Korean War or the painstaking business of building the Brooklyn Bridge. He did have his own share of inner gremlins that needed educating, as I love to remind him whenever we talk about mine. And he sleeps like a tornado. No matter how many ways I try to make the bed, we wake up in a twisted tangle of sheets and blankets and I’m lucky if I’m hanging on to a corner. He takes up so much of the bed sometimes that I have no choice but to snuggle up next to him and his nest of… you get the idea. But my parts didn’t.

From that day forward, as we figured out how my body was reacting to any message from the pleasure center, we started tentatively trying to recondition the system.

Mr. K would stand, stock still, with no sign of a threat or any indication that he might so much as think cuddly thoughts, and we would try this new-fangled hug thing, and I would take deep breaths.

Because deep breaths tell everybody in there, “We are safe.”

And when they shout back “NO WE’RE NOT! WE ARE DYING!”, you can use the deep breaths to reply, “You see, we are safe, because we are breathing slowly, and if we were running from a lion right now, we couldn’t be breathing in this calmly measured way now, could we?”

And then, they sort of look at each other in confusion, and, unable to think of a better argument, they seem to settle down and resign themselves to grumbling under their breath about how they really do think that we probably are dying and we’ll all be sorry we didn’t listen to them…

And, guess what? If you practice this meaningful ritual roughly 47,392 times in a row, they start to believe you!

They might even start to like it. They might even start to feel safe sometimes. Until we try a blow job, but that’s another story.

So, what’s the moral of this story?

The next time it feels like your nerves are on fire, and there’s a rock in the pit of your stomach, and your armpits are sweaty and you think you might be dying… it might be worth doing a little digging.

If you’re lucky, you might be like me, discovering that I had finally found Prince Charming, and that he was a good, kind man who loved me and wanted all the same things that I wanted and that he would never, ever leave me, even after being put through a human version of product reliability testing to the tune of 47,392 repetitions.

Because sometimes, when you dream on, maybe you really can imagine they’ll all come true. As long as Prince Charming waits for you.

🩵🩵🩵

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