My Poly Diary

Content warning: This post discusses emotional abuse, trauma, and healing. Please read with care.

Content warning: Emotional abuse, gaslighting, manipulation, trauma. Please look after yourself as you read. If it feels overwhelming, it’s okay to pause and come back later.

Trigger Warning : This post discusses emotional abuse, gaslighting, and the lasting psychological effects of manipulation. Please take care while reading. Note : As always, I write under the name Flynn to preserve my own privacy and the privacy of those involved. Names have been changed.

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.