My Poly Diary

I’ve spent a long time thinking that love meant anxiety. Not in so many words, maybe, but in the way that I only felt sure I loved someone when I was also terrified of losing them. When I couldn’t stop thinking about them. When I was panicking over how they felt, what I said, if I was doing enough. The loudest feelings in the room were fear and guilt, and I mistook that noise for passion. For love. Looking back, it’s not hard to see why. I have ADHD. I also carry a good amount of anxiety and unhealed trauma—some of which looks a lot like CPTSD. For most of my life, I’ve struggled with object permanence, which in relationships becomes emotional permanence. When someone wasn’t in front of me, they vanished. And that vanishing didn’t feel neutral—it felt like loss, abandonment, failure. So I tried to keep them in my head constantly, so they could know I was thinking of them. I thought, This must be love. This constant preoccupation. This pain. But I’m starting to unlearn that. I’m learni...

Trigger warning: Consent, Alcohol, Threats of violence This blog post reflects on my relationship with Willow, an ex, and some of the struggles we faced around communication and vulnerability.

One of the hardest parts of my relationship with Sammie was their inability to take accountability for any of their actions. Be it the dismissal of my feelings in every conversation, the repeated lying, or the abusive actions that “weren’t them, it was their mental health”… I have come to accept that I never received an apology for any of it, and I simply never will. The closest I came to a real apology was their proclamation that "they're a terrible person, who can't do anything". It’s a difficult pill to swallow, but one that I’ve needed to in order to be able to move forward, to take on my own personal accountability detached from everyone else. Despite all my best efforts, I haven’t done a good job of managing my own emotional reactivity. I recognise that a lot of my behaviours are a trauma response. I am prone to fawning, and historically I am terrified of conflict.

Trigger Warning: This post discusses mental health struggles, shame, and feelings of unworthiness. Please read with care and take breaks if needed. Looking back at my life, there has always been one creature in the shadows, lingering in the back of my mind, a pair of glasses distorting reality - shame. It was an undercurrent in every part of my life, hindering my relationships and shaping how I interacted with the world. I didn’t like myself—truthfully, I never had. I felt like an outsider, isolated and alone, always searching for a sense of belonging that seemed just out of reach. This is the story of how shame, fear, and mistrust shaped my life and led me to where I am today. From a young age, I felt like a weirdo. I didn’t feel like I had a place where I truly fit in, or friends who cared about me. In primary school then on into secondary school, I tried to be someone who fit in, doing other people’s homework for them, hoping it would make me feel wanted. I became a social butterfly...

Trigger Warning : This series discusses sensitive topics, including mental health struggles and suicidal thoughts. Please read with care, and prioritize your well-being. I didn’t begin this journey with polyamory as my goal. Instead, I was searching for something deeper—trying to understand what I truly want in life. For as long as I can remember, I’ve struggled with feelings of being unlovable and flawed. I often prioritized the happiness of others over my own well-being, convinced that my worth depended on how much I could give or how perfectly I could meet others’ expectations. This way of thinking followed me into my relationships. I felt like I owed the people around me more than I could give and lived in fear that if I failed them, they’d leave. Polyamory, for me, wasn’t an intentional choice so much as another way of trying to make sense of myself and the world around me. I thought that by loving freely, by attempting to embrace and articulate my own needs and desires, I might f...