The people I want with me are . . . 

Deep-chest breathers
Big-heart dealers
Sumptious soupers
Forehead boopers

Dedicated full-assers
Unashamed pleasure-baskers
Purposeful consent-askers
Whole-belly laughers

Moongazers
Doodlers
Silly-goosers

Dreampavers
Passionravers
Merrymakers
Eye-light savers

Shit-job pokers
Pie-in-the-sky stokers
You-got-this (they/gay/fae) folkers

Fuck-givers
Body-livers
Entitled-rich-dick-rippers

System corruptors
Safe-space constructors
Bottom-up disruptors
Change-wind conductors

Slow timers
Whimsical rhymers
Weird-ass mimers

Hope spammers
Cyber truck rammers
Kindness crammers

"God damn" kissers
Fantastic fungi trippers
Clothes-optional dippers

Dignity miners
"Different-than-me" finders
Beauty-in-the-world piners

Playful shit-talkers
Girthy-redwood-gawkers
"I hear you. I'm sorry. I'll do better." truthwalkers

The people I want with me are . . . 

Mine.
I'm theirs. 
We're ours. 

Part 1

Part 2

10. I want to feel everything

I want to feel it all. Goddammit.

“The joy and frustration of being caught by a drop of cold rain,” as Ellis Paul puts it.

I grew up in an environment and culture that demphasized and demonized feelings and emotions, unless they were performed/expressed in a specific religious way. Instead, for “men” specifically, reason, family/community leadership, and “steadfast faith” were the highest ideals.

I’ve always had big emotions, but they were socially conditioned out of me as a child, which led to a lot of dissociation and unhealthy cope in my early adult years. I’m on a journey to reclaim myself — appreciating and celebrating the emotional, sensitive, passionate, spontaneous, and nurturing person I am.

11. Relationship binaries are serving no one

Y’all, I’m convinced toxic monogamy and the tired/worn out categories we have to describe relationships are no good for anyone. Can’t we be more creative?

Most people have two categories: “friend” or “romantic relationship.” And god forbid you transgress the relationship binary.

In reality, humans are much more complicated than that. We have “friends” that we’re as close or closer to than our partners (especially when trust/safety is lacking). We are attracted to people we aren’t partnered with. We may love someone, but not be in a place where we can be healthily partnered with anyone. We may not feel romantic or sexual attraction at all. We may be in love with multiple people at the same time.

I’m convinced the answer is:

12. Communicate and build trust . . . that’s it (soap box #2)

Humans have agency and choice. I’m convinced you can navigate almost any relationship with trust and communication.

In my experience, the old narratives are straight up bullshit. If the vibe is right, you can be close friends with anyone, of any gender expression, without being in love with them or sleeping with them. And you can be attracted to someone and still make the decision to be good friends and leave it at that.

Humans have agency and choice.

My ex of 12 years is one of my best friends. I just spent a week with her in Portland and had a blast. No sex. No romance. Just best friends who have lived a lot of life together and know each other intimately.

Several of my other close friends are also women I’ve slept with — but at some point during one of our check ins, we talked it through and decided we work better as friends.

Here’s the catch: to build that level of trust and communication I think several things have to be true:

1. Consent and mutuality (in all aspects) are non-negotiables — I shouldn’t even have to say this . . . it should just be a foundational relationship pillar. Sadly, it’s not.

2. Each person involved has to be doing their own work to be a healthy human — Therapy, figuring out their emotional triggers, advocating for their own wants/needs, knowing their attachment styles, knowing what makes them insecure and how they respond to that, etc

3. Each person has to believe the other person’s communication of their felt experience (this one’s huge!) — It’s a non-starter if you can’t trust the other person’s communication of their felt experience. That doesn’t mean you have to agree they are “right” in a given situation. But, you do have to believe that their feelings/felt experience is valid and true as they are communicating it, even if it feels hard, painful, or unfair.

4. Each person has to want the other’s best, even if that means the other’s best isn’t them — I strongly believe that one of the hardest realities of true love for another (whatever the variety) is the willingness to acknowledge that there are times when what’s best for them isn’t you/about you. What if what’s best for someone means you stepping back and allowing them more space for other friends, solo activities, or new experiences they’ve always wanted to pursue? What if what’s best for someone is letting you go? That’s scary shit. But, I think real love is exactly that, wanting the other’s best even when it’s scary, even when it isn’t about and doesn’t center you.

5. Each person has to be comfortable having and initiating hard conversations — All healthy relationships include hard conversations. Everyone involved needs to be able to initiate those when they feel boxed in, trapped, disrespected, underappreciated, isolated, or for any other important reason.

6. Each person has to be willing to admit fault, apologize, and do better — No one gets it right all the time. You’ll hurt people close to you. That’s just a given. When you do, own it, apologize, and actually put in the time and effort to do better.

7. Each person has to be willing to share the load — This can go a lot of different ways. In any context, I think it feels good when all parties are initiating. It communicates mutual interest, appreciation, and affection. If you’re partnered, it feels like a no-brainer that all partners need to be working to foster equity in agreed-upon ways (including sharing the mental load of shopping, meal prep, household chores, etc).

Part 3 coming soon!

5. Healthy/communicative adults can navigate most hard things

My ex (married 10 years) is still one of my best friends, despite a hard and destabilizing divorce (I just had a lovely trip visiting her in Portland). It took a lot of self-reflection and therapy, but we had hard, honest, and emotional discussions that allowed us to process things with each other. I’ve had more of these kinds of conversations in the last several years than in most periods of my life. And nearly every time, the relationship ended up stronger for it — even when the conversations were difficult, awkward, or painful. But it takes hard work, effort, and empathy. For me, it’s been more than worth it.

6. Advocate for yourself — your wants and needs matter

I put this as #5 on purpose (because I think it’s intimately connected with #4). I believe that to be healthy in any relationship, you have to learn to value yourself, believe that your wants and needs matter, and advocate for them.

Advocating for yourself enables your friends and/or partner(s) to show up authentically in the relationship, instead of being worried that they’re fucking up. They can be themselves — knowing you’ll simply tell them if you aren’t receiving enough support/consideration or if their words/actions hurt you.

If the people in your life truly care about you, then they want to hear about how they can love and support you better (even if it means owning their shit and apologizing). And if they’re not doing that . . . maybe it’s time to find folks who will.

7. Surround yourself with people who are excited to be around you

Y’all, life is short — too short to be spending time and mental energy on people that aren’t excited to be in your life and commit to fully supporting you as much as they can. Of course, we all have coworkers, relatives, friends of a friend, etc. that we see occasionally and just make small talk with. That’s just normal life shit.

I’m talking about close friends, confidants, partners, bosom friends . . . I’ve had stretches of my life where I made myself smaller to better fit into the lives of those closest to me, and I lost myself in the process.

The world is expansive, and there are people in it who are your biggest fans, even if they don’t know it yet. People who will write you notes and drop off little treats when you’ve had a hard day. People who pay close attention when you talk to them. People who follow up. People who initiate because they want to be with you. People who care about the people around them and do their work to be kind not just to you, but also to your friends and others close to you. People who admit when they’re wrong/have hurt you and actually follow through on trying to do better.

Find THOSE people and hold onto them, with rugged hands and a soft heart.

8. You can’t make someone like/love you

I was partnered for 12 years and after a separation, found myself as a single 35-year-old with a lot of questions and too much time on my hands. I had a lot of identity invested in being someone to someone else, and then suddenly that was gone, which left me feeling insecure and adrift.

And in the early days post-separation, my tendency was to deflect these hard emotions by hyper-focusing on other people. I met a few folks who I desperately wanted to like me. So, when I was with them, I edited myself and created a version of me that I thought would appeal to them. In the end, I just felt more insecure and exhausted — trying to act out a “Jason” that didn’t even end up producing the “desired result” anyway.

You can’t make someone like/love you. In fact, in my experience, the harder you try, the poorer it goes (because I think it often comes from a place of insecurity/unhealthy neediness). Regardless of the nature of the relationship, true chemistry, attraction, connection, and trust cannot be forced.

Do the work to figure out who you are, what you like, what’s important to you, what attracts you, and then try to show up in spaces confident in who you are. Humans are constantly changing, and for me, this is always a bit of a moving target.

But I’ve done a lot of work to like myself. If somebody is into that, right on. If not, I’m not going to try to convince them otherwise.

9. Pleasure is worth pursuing/celebrating

Pleasure is beautiful and comes in so many different forms. For me, that could be a robust and umami-packed bowl of ramen, a procrastinated task finally tackled and accomplished, sitting on the porch in the summer when a storm rolls in, mine and a lover’s body intimately intertwined and indistinguishable from each other, a cat fully committing to lay on my chest, long late-night walks around town, playing music with people I care about . . . Chase it. Celebrate it. And when you find it for yourself, revel in it.

The last few years have been a whirlwind and some of the most reflective I’ve had in a while. I’ve discovered a lot about myself and loss, identity, grief, loneliness, possibility, hope, sex, communication, and more. Consider this a reference list for the things taking up space, rent-free, in my chaotic brain.

I’ve broken the post up into several parts to make it a bit more digestible.

1. Go to fucking therapy (soap box #1)

Going to therapy has been one of the best decisions I’ve made in the last 5 years. It’s hard, can be expensive (I had to pay out of pocket, which is a privilege I know everyone can’t afford), and will probably make things “worse” at first rather than “better.” But, for me, it’s transformed the way I look at myself and the world - making me a more thoughtful and empathetic human.

Although there are certainly days when it feels good to go and get shit out, that’s not the main benefit of therapy for me. The biggest change is that I’m now better at recognizing thought and behavioral patterns in my life and understanding the way they affect my choices, emotions, and how I relate to others.

For example, I know that when I feel an overwhelming urge to do something or take immediate action in a particular situation or relationship, that’s pretty much always a sign that I’m dysregulated and trying to deflect complex emotions rather than work through them. I used to confuse this with authentic spontaneity or emotion (which I fully endorse and try to act on). It took me a lot of work to distinguish between the two.

I know now that when I’m dysregulated, my body is tense. I often have indigestion/what feels like something right in the middle of my gut. I feel compelled to act, almost as if I’m not in control. I’m on edge.

When I’m regulated, I’m excited and passionate - exercising my ability to choose to do something out of a desire or thankfulness for another person or an experienced thing. It can still feel risky, but it’s a different kind of nervousness/risk than when I’m dysregulated.

They feel very different to me now, although it can still take time for me to sort out which is which.

So now, instead of acting on an impulse and potentially passing my dysregulation onto other folks (often in a way that isn’t healthy or causes harm), I take a walk, bake bread, talk through it with a trusted friend, or do something else creative/generative to reregulate. Then, I take stock again and see if that feeling or impulse is worth acting on or if it was simply an unhealthy coping response.

I have countless examples like that, where I’m working towards health (both mental and physical), where there previously was anxiety and dysfunction. Get ya some therapy. You’ll be better for it.

Feel free to ask me more about my experience. I’m happy to share!

2. Both things can be true (and learning to live in that tension takes practice)

I used to try to fit my experiences into neat little categories with clear dividing lines. It was simpler.

Christian/secular, right/wrong, good/bad, male/female, us/them, black/white, gay/straight, true/false . . .

I tried so hard to make it work. But now, life feels infinitely more complicated and intricate than that to me.

People who genuinely love me have deeply wounded me. I’ve seen religion provide healthy purpose/meaning for some while simultaneously serving as the basis for unspeakable acts of cruelty, meanness, and even genocide for others. Some of the poorest people I’ve known have had the most to give. And some of the wealthiest I’ve known have been the most needy.

But with variety and nuance comes tension. For me, it’s taken practice to try to better live in the tension. I’ve learned not to trust my first reaction to something and instead examine it, especially if it’s an intellectual response to someone with a significantly different lived experience than me.

In those contexts, I think my first reaction is often a defense mechanism, a well-meaning but underdeveloped part of myself whose default is to resist new evidence and the possibility of destabilizing change.

With practice, I’ve gotten better at living in the tension — recognizing multiple things can be true/valid even if they seem contradictory, assuming less, and being more open to change.

And, I feel/hope that’s made me a more thoughtful and empathetic person.

3. Put your body in spaces where people are different than you . . . and listen. It will change your life.

Head knowledge is important. But, there is nothing as powerful as lived and embodied experience. I’m still not very good at this. But, I’ve been trying to put my actual physical body in more spaces where I, as a cishet white man, am not in the majority and listen more than I talk.

One way I try to practice this is by being involved in a pro-Palestine book club where I am pretty much always in the minority. It makes me quite uncomfortable at times to have my presuppositions challenged — which is so healthy. I’ve learned a lot, and I consider much more carefully when I do speak, because it actually matters. People in the room (and their relatives) are living every day what I’m just theorizing about in my head.

When ideas become embodied in the lives of real people, something changes. You pause. You listen. And you have the opportunity to either expand and grow, or contract and entrench. But either way, you are at least forced to consider somebody else’s perspective and lived experience (which is not the case when you isolate or primarily hang out with people who look like and believe the same things as you).

4. Nothing matters . . . everything matters

“Everything, Everywhere, All at Once” is one of my favorite movies, and I think it legitimately changed my brain. It does such an exceptional job of pointing out how absurd and purposeless life is/can feel in one sense — nothing matters . . . while simultaneously pointing out how impactful every little point of human connection and interaction is — everything matters.

Yes. Life often is bleak and pointless, especially for those at the bottom who have little power or influence. That shouldn’t be downplayed. There are truly scary things going on in the world. History repeats itself, and it can feel impossible to hope. It’s powerful, deflating shit.

But, the hand of someone you love brushing yours, a kind word earnestly meant, smiling when you make eye contact with a stranger at a stoplight who is also jamming to their favorite tunes, butter on warm bread, your lungs burning from the frigid air on a clear winter night when the stars all decide to come out and dance at once — these are also powerful things.

They matter.

They have weight.

They are totems of goodness.

Pathways back to the earth.

To feeling again.

To living again.

What Gerard Manley Hopkins would call “the dearest freshness deep down things.”

I didn’t know you yet

I didn’t see you yet

But then I saw you again

And again

And again

And again

And again

And now when I see you

I marvel

I’m not convinced I actually want to feel “happy.” I think I just want to feel alive. Like sitting on the porch as a storm rolls in alive — what Simon and Garfunkel call “the joy and frustration of being caught by a drop of cold rain” alive. Walking in the middle of the woods with no one else around alive. Fresh baked bread alive. Three hour conversations around a campfire alive. Warm butternut squash soup on a cold day (with feta on top) alive. Slightly tipsy hanging out with bosom friends alive. Driving with your windows down blasting the same song for 30 minutes straight alive. Pushing past small talk to share real life shit alive. Awkwardly taking off your clothes in front of someone for the first time alive. Shitty singing at 2am in a karaoke bar alive. That first kiss with someone new alive. The 1,000th kiss with someone who knows you and chooses to stay alive. 3 beers and 2 shots in dancing at a gay bar in Boise, Idaho alive. A friend canceling on you so they can get laid alive. Knowing you can tell a person anything and they will still hug you alive.

People walk past me. I think they also want to be alive . . . want to FEEL alive. 

“She’s not even reached out.” 

“Do you need to go potty” 

“This stick is a bow and arrow”

“I’m not practicing as much as I need to, but anyway . . .”

“The girls can drive one of their vehicles if they want to”

“That’s not really what I care about you know . . . so there’s definitely a mix” 

“Well, it is nice . . . and her dog’s dying. Yeah. So, I’m going to see if she can come over for a wine Wednesday” 

God . . . we’re all fucking pointless and devastatingly beautiful — stubbornly existing and throwing ourselves again and again at the world until one of us breaks. 

How much salt do you think the ground can hold? How many eons of evaporated tears before the soil’s too bitter to bear food? How much spilled blood before it starts pooling in bogs? How many families ripped apart before the world bursts at the seams? How many nights holding another human close before it begins knitting itself back together again?

Tomorrow, I might feel nothing. But, tonight. Tonight in this park, I think I feel alive. And that’s something.

Here are a few terms that may help you the next time you’re struggling in a social situation. 

Menty Bae: That toxic lover who comes around every month or month and half like clockwork (frequency will vary). The experience is always memorable, unsettling, and requires deep-breathing to re-regulate. 

Example: “Hey mom, this is my menty bae, Kevin. Yes, the one I talk about in therapy.” 

Assoscreant: You may or may not be close with this person. Generally, this is someone you originally met in a professional context of some kind (work, PTA meeting, etc).. But, when you get together, shit always goes down. 

Example: “This is my assoscreant, Blaze. Where did you say the open bar was?” 

Curmudgem: Your favorite anti-social friend that has a true heart of gold — prefers the company of nature, animals, and themselves to other people in many cases.  

Example: “Hey Dan, this is my curmudgem, Beth. She collects fungi, shells, unique mosses, and is a therapist for socially anxious elephants.”

Broomate: This one’s pretty self-explanatory. This is your roommate(s) (AFAB or AMAB) who is also a witch.

Example: “My broomates, Willow and Thom, organized a lovely Solstice party for us last week, complete with dried oranges, incense, and a ritual cleansing.” 

Bane Squeeze: That one current or ex-partner that ruins your nervous system and hijacks every decent relationship in your life.

Example: “This is Brad, my bane squeeze. Yes, I know . . .”

Lover-in-residence: Your current lover who is in a trial-period of sorts. The option is on the table to make things more committed down the road, but it is not guaranteed. You’re both super bougie. 

Example: “This is my lover-in-residence, Sebastian. Yes, the Met Gala was lovely last week, thanks for asking. Llana Del Rey as wood nymph — a triumph. No notes.” 

Boo-fang: Your partner who is a werewolf. Alternatively, your partner who is a vampire. Since this term has multiple meanings and can refer to two groups that are often at odds with each other, be judicious about using this term in public and do your best to make the meaning clear with context clues. 

Example: “My boo-fang, Guillermo, and I never eat mediterranean. The shish kabobs can be quite triggering.” 

Hover: This is a niche term for a lover with unhealthy anxious-attachment. 

Example: “I’m getting frustrated with my hover, Taika. He triple-texts all the time . . . ” 

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