My Story

This started as a blog post, then transformed into my first earnest attempt to write this all down. So, it will continue to be that. I will revise this and add to it as I can. Eventually it will be the framework for telling individual stories within this story. I will leave it in its original draft for now and continue to write here....

My relationship addiction

Originally I was going to start a journal at the beginning, I mean right here, today, sitting on the couch. But none of it would make sense if I didn't at least share with you a brief version of the whole story.

I am an addict in many ways. I was born to be an addict and I knew that in the way that teenagers are taught in health class to say "I shouldn't try XYZ, I know I have an addictive personality" but it is impossible to understand until you are in the throes of chemical dependency exactly what an addiction is, or means. When I was saying such things, I was thinking about my great grandfather's alcoholism, and my dad's shopping addiction. I could feel this dark pull inside me. But now I have observed in my own patterns that my addiction is to specific people and relationships, and it comes from a personality disorder.

This first started presenting for me as a very young girl, with very mild examples of this kind of behavior being my obsession with individual friends throughout elementary and middle school, where my self worth was mostly based on the amount and type of attention I recieved from these girls- girls who were much more socially successful than I (I usually only had one friend at a time). When I entered 8th grade, I was rarely attending my middle school and was rather spending most of the day at the high school where I was sent to take math classes. This is where I met Caitlin, who was one year older than me and had just moved from New Jersey. Never had I experienced anything like my NEED for her company. I followed her down the hallways, hugged her very tight after class, and when I got home I would wait by the computer to count down the 8 minutes it would take for her to get home, so after 15 I would send her a message and ask to play video games together. I would stay up and text her until my bedtime at 9.30, and give myself panic attacks when she didn't answer me. Thinking of it now, I don't know if she was actually always so quiet or if that girl just did not like me very much. I wanted to kiss her desperately and I was sexually attracted to her, but I didn't know this at the time, I just thought we were best friends! She had a boyfriend back in New Jersey, which last I spoke to her probably 5 years ago they were still together and engaged. I remember trying to get close to him in a desperate need to consume her at which point she thought I was trying to steal her boyfriend. The relationship was pretty much over the day he drove 8 hours up here to see her, and I showed up unexpectedly with roses and chocolate dipped brownies I had made. I couldn't control myself from wanting to meet him (to consume another extention of Caitlin), and her, and him and her. She hugged me and told me to leave and I never met him. Our friendship was always tepid with very little actual chemistry between us, but my brain was stuck on something about her. I used to turn over her scent in my mind, and though I don't remember it so clearly anymore, sometimes I smell someone that uses that detergent or shampoo walk by and I recognize it instantly. The story ends after the chocolate and roses with a letter I wrote her and gave her on the bus, which went something like "We can't be friends, I feel very close to you and it feels strange inside". I sobbed when I gave it to her and the whole way home and all night. She was quiet. I always thought that was just her, an infinitely reserved person. With retrospect, I wonder if she felt relief that the weird dyke was finally leaving her alone and she would finally be able to breathe and relax again that I was gone.

So, here I am now, divorced. My behavior with Caitlin repeated. First with Moira (at this point I knew what I was feeling wasn't friend feelings, but we had boundaries such that touching, cuddling was acceptable which satiated those desires and drove me fucking crazy), then in college with Kaiden and Jayden, which were much shorter lived obsessions. I left college in spring of 2020 and moved to Ogqunquit Maine where I met my soon to be husband, Kiernan.

Trying to remember what happened to me.

No stranger to relatioship addiction by 20, I met Kiernan-Alex and was instantly enraptured by him. 9 years my senior, I was desperate for his approval and his teaching. At this time, Kiernan had been fresh off a morphine binge and I was recently released from the mental hospital and had disowned my parents to live as a man. He drank heavily, our first day together we shared two bottles of wine and three joints over the course of 4 or 5 hours. I had never drank or smoked like that and was so sick- it wouldn't take long for me to catch up with him. We moved in together with a third roommate, the two of us becoming best of friends that shared a wall. We left the door between our rooms open all the time and we practiced tarot together by the oil lamp and the summer moon. In the mornings Alex would drink a shot of whiskey, or a glass of wine, and stomp around the house while I picked up smoking cigarettes and we would drive to work. Oh how he hated our roommate. When their family and friends came over Kiernan would scream and throw chairs off the porch and drink and stomp up and down the broken stairs. I felt like I was constantly diffusing his rage. When it was directed at a specific person he had the control to keep himself out of trouble by punching or throwing other things or screaming or drinking. But when he was angry at the world and not just one person, everyone became a target. This is when he slashes tires and threatens people on the street and case managers. Often he would direct his anger not at me but at "people like me" and he would berate me for hours. Once at our home in Maine he had done or said something that scared me so badly I knew I could no longer ignore all the red flags. I really really liked Kiernan, but I knew as a man with good sense that anyone with that amount of uncontrolled anger and a tendency to turn it towards me would eventually hurt me, and I was better to leave sooner rather than later. I packed the Volvo. He came out and begged me to come back and talk to him, which I did, and I remember him apologizing for screaming and scaring me (which he really only did that once, and the one final time I saw him. The rest of the relationship he blamed me for my weakness being unable to handle and respect his "big emotions"). I stayed. That was the last time I tried to run away.

Kiernan decided he wouldn't pay rent until our roommate contacted the landlord to fix the stairs, and I was to tell our roommate. Later that week we came home to our roommate with 4 or 5 guys sitting surrounding them on the porch. Kiernan said it was a threat, that they were there to threaten us, and he screamed right there in the kitchen, 10 feet and a screen door away, that he was going to kill them all. He began to cry, confused and scared, and sunk down onto the floor into my arms. We went up into our bedroom and drank wine and watched movies until midnight. Cops called out from the living room, unwilling to go up the stairs, our birth names, which neither of us had told anyone from our new lives in Maine. Rhiland had called the police and said Kiernan threatened to kill him. He denied it and I covered him for the first time, saying we had been on our own all night. Rhiland accused me of "ripping the door off its hinges in anger", showing the cops the 2 foot closet door I had removed from its hardware and was re painting. Kiernan volunteered us to leave, right then and there, and we packed the Volvo. He drove drunk, without a license, 30 minutes to work where we stayed the night. We shared a bed and I held him.

Thus began our whirlwind of homelessness and our romantic and sexual relationship. We lived in a tent in a campground and continued our employment at the hotel, but often missed shifts and was late due to this. The staff at our job began bullying me for being transgender and when Kiernan stood up for me we were both fired and sent to another hotel. He was miserable at the Hilton. I worked 7am to noon and he worked from 3pm to 11pm so we rarely saw each other. He began threatening to kill himself if I didn't get us out of there, and out of Portland, which was such a "nothing city" to him it made him constantly angry. I got a call from his case manager during work one day that he was going to attempt suicide and I needed to take him to the hospital. I left my shift and went upstairs to cool him down and he begged me not to take him to the hospital. They called us on the hotel phone and told us we had 45 minutes to pack up and go.

I called my mom crying, told her we had become homeless and asked if we could stay with them to figure something out. By this point I lost count of how many times I had packed up my life into that Volvo. We drove to Tilton, NH and had a less-than-stellar lunch at the Tilton Diner then made a detour to the Fun Spot in Laconia, which he hated, then the final two hour haul up to my parents' house. God I was nervous. The Volvo died, right there in the driveway. It never ran again.

What happened that night at my parents' house will need its own blog post, so I will simply have to continue on to a few days later when we moved to a campground in Eden, Vermont with my sister's old Saab. I was already an alcoholic at this point and smoking a pack of cigarettes in three or so days, but this is when my drinking really began in earnest. I would get up in the morning, make coffee and breakfast and tend the fire. I would spend all day reading the classifieds and the personals in 7 Days and drinking Tin Cup or Maker's Mark out of the bottle. Kiernan called his old case managers in Colorado to see what kind of help would be out there. He told me that there was great homeless resources, and he knew we could both get jobs, and on September 3, 2021 we flew to Denver International Airport with nowhere to go.

My experience of homelessness in Denver and Boulder also deserves its own blog post. In fact, it deserves many, many of its own blog posts, and hopefully someday this can all come into a book or some cohesive way to weave my story for others to understand. It is not linear in my own head, after all. We slept on the river in Boulder for about a week before Kiernan developed a severe UTI and we moved into a shelter. Shortly after we were married in mid September. He raped me two weeks later. We read tarot on the street for 10$ a reading every single day, all day until we got jobs in Denver. I worked at a costume store for the halloween season and he worked at a crystal store. In late October we got our own apartment and I lost my job shortly after. I was unemployed for a month. I began working at a pawn shop in December and we had for the first time together, what I always wanted- stability.

It was threatened by how much he hated Denver, how again, it was a "nothing city". The racism was really hard on him and hard on our relationship and came from all sides. It came from my parents through me in ways I didn't understand. Our relationship suffered continually, from being unhappy in Denver. It suffered from the two of swords we both lived under, choosing between him and my family. It suffered under the escalating alcoholism, my failure to meet emotional needs and connect in a meaningful way. By the critical point of the relationship, when the love really mattered, there was so much fear inside me already that I couldn't find it in me to CHOOSE him. I simply lived under him in fear.