Over

Sometimes I think my dad is right: I overshare.

I over-everything, really. Always have.

I'm getting better at curtailing the knee-jerk overreaction I used to be famous for (Breadner trait, that)...but the impulse to jerk that knee is still there. Something hurtful happens on Facebook? Let's think about deactivating the Facebook account for a while. 

I find it interesting, in a darkly amusing sort of way, that I don't ever think of just not posting to Facebook for a day, or a week, or what have you. I have several friends who post to their Facebook accounts once a month or so, and as much as I realize that's the healthy way of using the site...I can't seem to do it. I'll resolve that this will be my one post for today, this really sad song that sums up my current emotional state extremely well...and half an hour later I'll see something online that makes me think of someone, and wouldn't she like to see this? I think I need to share this with him. 

I overreact, or at least have the urge to, because I over-feel. I over-feel because...who the hell knows. It just is, a fact of life, as immutable as the tides. Coping with such huge billows of feeling has been my life's burden. I've never been able to lessen them. Not on my own.

My first impulse, when something good OR bad happens to me, is to share it. As widely as possible, within the constraints of privacy (other people's; I don't invoke my own very often). Because Callahan's Law is one of the few absolutes of my life: shared pain is lessened; shared joy, increased. That has always been my experience, since long before I learned of Spider Robinson, who first expressed that law. 

Almost always.

The exception to Callahan's Law comes when you violate some other widely held social convention. And yes, I'm going there again, because apparently I overemphasize this aspect of myself:

I over-love.

“The more you love, the more you can love--and the more intensely you love. Nor is there any limit on how many you can love. If a person had time enough, he could love all of that majority who are decent and just." --Robert A. Heinlein

Over-loving, otherwise known as polyamory, leaves you open to both joys and miseries that can only be shared with people who over-love themselves. The "normal" people out there don't get it, and trying to explain it just provokes head-scratches. Rare indeed is the monogamous person who truly understands compersion. And if one partner dumps you, the instant monogamous reaction is MAYBE THIS IS A SIGN YOU SHOULD ONLY HAVE ONE PARTNER LIKE THE REST OF US.

Aside: I am sick unto death of mono-normative memes. They're everywhere: the "one true love", "soulmate", "other half" expressions that irk me at best and outright offend me at worst.
Here's one of the offensive ones: Polyamorous people are quite often told that being poly is a phase, that "you just haven't found the right person yet". Yesterday I saw a post in a poly forum on Facebook that had me cackling with glee: MONOGAMOUS? YOU JUST HAVEN'T FOUND THE RIGHT PEOPLE YET!"

I was talking to one of my closest friends last week about the state of my love life, and the heartbreak I sensed might be on the horizon. This is a monogamous woman who, nevertheless, has exhibited an amazing degree of understanding about polyamory...in the past. Her succinct and rather brutal response was "you need to get over her".

Over...there's that word again.

That stung. Not only because it felt so dismissive, but because it revealed she didn't understand that part of me at all.

I don't "get over" people. The best I can do, and it takes a Herculean effort, is to refrain from expressing the love I have for them. It's still there. In every case. It would take a single sentence from them to spark the coal into a roaring flame, but the coal ember never goes dark. And in some cases, the flame itself is eternal.

It's hard to share pain when it's not acknowledged as painful. It's hard to share joy when the person you're sharing it with believes joy is some finite thing that diminishes when it's shared.

I am slowly starting to discover people who think and feel like I do. Not just online, either. And that, let me tell you, is both joy and indescribable relief. I can not and will not be discussing anything along these lines, of course, out of respect for privacy. The stigma is, to put it mildly, fucking ridiculous. You get less opprobrium CHEATING on people than you do loving more than one honestly and openly, and I will NEVER understand that.

Let's just say for the record that there are many more poly people in this city than I could have imagined and leave it at that...while noting that I still find myself hugely attracted to people (a person) I shouldn't be, and I'm no further along dealing with that than I was a couple of months ago.

Some things, it appears, are never really over.