on the loss of idealism
the space between theory & practice
This morning, after finishing a morning pages notebook, I was rooting through my bookshelf looking for a new notebook that I could use for my morning pages. One fell out, and it was not new, but an old notebook that I had at the start of 2020 that opened naturally to a page. I read the page and was so struck by what I was writing—it was during a moment where I had been re-reading the Ethical Slut. In the morning pages notebook, I gushed about how positive I was feeling; that the book had been really permission giving for me, that I felt really affirmed in honoring the idea of the beauty of each connection in your life and not putting precedent or undue importance on a romantic relationship as above all the other relationships, and how I loved orienting around not asking myself “is this MY person” or “is this THE person,” but instead asking myself—is this a genuine connection that feels good in my spirit and that I want to pursue?
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Like all things with theory, they are only tested by practice, by small experiments into loving relationships and the unknown. They’re tested when a crisis in community or in relationship happens and we have to put our repair skills to the test and see what we can birth.
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I remember my life prior to lockdown 2020: I was working a job that was draining, often working 10-13 hour days on that job, pursuing my own art, in a series of floundering and confusing polyamorous connections, and deeply involved in community organizing work around transformative justice, particularly when it pertained to issues of sexual consent. I remember thinking of how drained I constantly felt at that time, but flipping through my morning pages I was surprised by how light and positive they were. I was inspired by the things that I was reading, I was inspired by possibility, I was inspired by what could be.
A few months later, possibility seemed to drain out before us as the pandemic struck, and we were pushed into our own homes and isolation. In honesty, I feel us still recovering from that—most people that I knew had some sort of dark night of the soul/ spiritual awakening in the years since, realizing that they perhaps were being over-drained by their relationships or pace of life and needed to create more boundaries to help them. Most people I know had break ups, or falling outs with friends, or deep shifts in their community or family structures. Most people I know lost or changed jobs, had income fluctuation, faced industries that were changing and a failing economy, and struggled financially.
Most people I know had to learn how to dream again, how to pour back into the idea of possibility. We had to re-learn our relationship to hope, to care, to thinking about not what is, but what could be.
The amount of collective trauma that we’ve experienced—and are still experiencing—with COVID, feels unprecedented. I feel like we’re constantly undoing that knot, not into what was, because it can no longer be. But trying to undo it in a way that allows for the possibility of something new.
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A few nights ago, I hung out with one of my most beloved friends.
At the crux of some of our conversation was us reflecting on the deep turmoil of our twenties—coming up in poetry communities where we needed to learn restorative justice and repair skills in order to deal with a lot of rampant sexual assault that was occurring in our communities. We talked about things we had witnessed not only in our twenties, but continued into our thirties, and how it seemed like some the strategies we developed in communities were not fully working, and how we were seeing abusers that we had been in community with, who we knew caused harm, repurpose the language of accountability to shirk responsibility, only to crop up in another relationship or community and harm someone else.
On our walk to the train, I confessed a sticky feeling that I was having—that I was feeling the loss of idealism. In my twenties, I had really deep faith in so many principles—the principles of restorative justice and community repair work, the principles of polyamory. And what I was feeling now was that some of the rose-colored glasses were coming off for me, and what I was seeing was that some of these things that I so deeply believed in during my twenties and early thirties, have contributed to some of the deepest harm that I have experienced.
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One of the feelings that I had during 2020 was the disillusionment of my idealism around polyamory. Re-reading my morning pages notebook, I deeply know and feel that to be true in myself—I don’t often approach relationships with the idea of ‘is this MY person’, but rather: does this feel like a genuine connection that I want to pursue, and what’s the best container to pursue it in? I don’t pursue relationships with only the desire for sexual intimacy, but for genuine intimacy that feels right to the connection, and I can’t imagine being in a relationship that didn’t have a deep cornerstone of friendship and care that was built between us.
I remember prior to lock down feeling like I believed in structures like Relationship Anarchy and non-hierarchical relationships. From a theoretical point of view, they rang true in my body and in the way that my mind naturally thinks about relationships. My theory was so bright that I mistook it to be what I was doing in my life. Like all young people struck by a new way of being, I evangelized about it nonstop.
However, what I came to find, was in practice that didn’t seem like the reality that I lived in. When lockdown happened, it became really clear who—and what—were priorities to people. There was a deep moment where the universe asked us, if you could only see a few people in proximity to you for your health, who would that be? And what happened was that despite the language and theory folks were using around relationship structures and non-hierarchy—hierarchy really did exist, hierarchy really was true, and it became quite clear that all relationships boiled down to priorities, and who and what made the cut with limited resources.
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On a walk with my reiki teacher, we posed the question: what does loyalty look like?
To me, trust is the field between you and another person. Loyalty is the commitment to show up and tend to the field of trust. You both are responsible for planting the field, for tending to it, for burning the parts that need to regrow, for weeding out what no longer serves. Loyalty, fidelity, is about the prioritization of that field. It doesn’t mean that field has to be prioritized above all others, it doesn’t mean that field has to be prioritized at the expense of yourself. But it does mean that as long as we engage in this relationship, we’re both responsible to faithfully tending the field, for showing up for the hard seasons and the seasons of abundance.
Trust, and loyalty, is broken when one person does something to damage the field, and doesn’t properly nurture it after. So, if one person brings someone into the field that harms another, trust is broken. If one person is constantly dumping toxic chemicals into the field and expecting the other to clean it, trust is broken. If one person ignores the rules that both parties agreed to tend to the field, then trust is broken. If one person turns their back to the field for long stretches of time, especially if it’s in favor for some other bright field, then, of course—trust, and loyalty, is broken.
So here we are, juggling our tending to the field. Sometimes my capacity is such that I can only tend to the field I have between myself, my work and God. Sometimes, I can only tend to the field of my friendships and family. Sometimes, I can only tend to the field of my romantic partnership.
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