Three, Two, One

By Kimberly Dark

Jim and I were on the phone, discussing his recent love-gone-wrong, and, boy, did he feel like shit. He wondered if it’d be possible to have a do-over for that threesome. Get it right.

And I wondered if it was possible for the sex to go wrong. Or is it always the relationships that go wrong and cause the sex to falter? I mean, barring force, coercion, infection or… can sex go wrong? Or is it the relationships?

The do-over would be reparative, Jim explained. They’d invite that guy back again for another threesome. Jim had it worked out in his head. They could fuck him like this, or like that. Make eye contact with each other at just the right moment. Get everyone in the groove.

I listened. Unconvinced. Even Jim was not convinced as he made the argument.

“But sometimes there’s such ecstasy in a threesome,” said Jim. “I mean, when it’s great, it’s great. And when it’s not?”

My mind answered the question: There’s emotional turmoil and feelings of inadequacy, or disrespect, or abandonment and you think about it for days, weeks, months. Had it been a year since their first go of it? He added, “The problem wasn’t the threesome.”

I nodded silently, on the phone, when he said it.

Really? Jim met Mr. Threesome for drinks just to get his take on the situation, even after Jim and his partner had parted ways. From the invited guest’s point of view, everything was great. Mr. Threesome is involved in his own drama with his husband divorcing him to move to Brazil with a younger man, though. What does he know? No, definitely, everything was great.

It’s sort of a miracle when two people make enough of the same story of their interactions, their looks, their words, and alliances in order to have a good experience, settle down and enjoy some time. Definitely a miracle to make it last.

During the lengthy catch-up with Jim, I have also begun thinking about the most recent person I dated. Just a week, then friendship. “Flirtatious friendship,” she said.

“What are you getting out of that?” I grumped.

Something went wrong. Or maybe it went right. How could I know which?

About a year ago, I overheard a conversation that has stayed with me. I was in a gallery where a woman’s art was being shown, and someone smiled and marveled at her domestic feat—she and her husband: forty years together this year! Her husband said, “Yeah, no trick really. If you’re lucky to meet someone when you’re both young enough, you grow up together. All of your likes and dislikes develop together. How you handle things. You know what the other person means. That makes it easy. We get along. ” They both smiled and nodded, like a postcard image from the land of happy relationships.

Maybe it’s lucky that I still have some growing up to do.

See how I did that? Went straight to optimism rather than saying, god, you’re screwed really, if you try to partner up as an adult, an older adult, an adult with your own ways of coping and finding beauty in the world, thank you very much. Don’t harsh my mellow, babe. I already know how things work. One could see it like that instead. I’m always so fucking optimistic.

“Doesn’t there have to be some kind of effortless frisson in a good threesome?” I said to Jim. “Or some kind of arduous planning? I mean, as soon as you’re trying to make it go well, it’s already not going well. So, the do-over would never work. The two of you with the plan would be maneuvering the third in order to get it right. And then that third guy— that guy who’s not part of your relationship, that guy who’s really great and really hot and carrying around his own drama—that guy’s just a prop.

“I don’t relate to sex like that,” I said to Jim.

•••

But, of course, sometimes I do. I’m always telling some kind of story in my head—I think everyone does that. I am also feeling the body. And perceiving the other person. It’s not like we respond to one another based on animal musk alone. We have interconnected stories. Sometimes our stories rub each other the wrong way, though there can be attraction in that too. And what about emotions? Always a river of emotion just beneath the skin. A grip that leaves bruising can mean pleasure and the most tender touch, pain. An embrace soothes one day, stifles the next. The lexicon is unstable. It’s amazing we ever understand each other at all. Perhaps the range of human stories is smaller than I’m willing to admit.

“You showed me tenderness,” my date said.

And I learned that was a bad thing. Only not bad, because, wow, who would call that bad? I didn’t even know what I’d done that could be interpreted as tender. I’m just being… human, I thought. But yeah, that can look a lot of ways. Tenderness caused distance, which wasn’t what I was hoping for. It wasn’t what she wanted either, at least not at first. She was so interested in me at first—and remains so, though in an oddly constructed sort of way. I pouted and pondered. Then I laughed at myself. Always back to compassion and amusement, still a little weird and nervous; hopeful me.

Even with two. Even with one. We are telling ourselves our stories. My body and mind don’t always know each other. Emotions spring from both, make a wet mess or a happy puddle. How can it feel so good to sleep in the wet, metal, acid, musty funk of sex, body truly relaxed? Body rent, spent, heavy with sleep, still whole. Is “good sex” even about knowing someone, or just imagining what we mean to each other, what we ourselves have become, with the other?

I’ve felt alone in a loved one’s embrace too.

“I have issues with trust.” My date said. And I was listening and trying to understand, but I didn’t understand. Why would a person let that shit win? Yeah, so what? That’s my story. Maybe I was not listening well enough. Try again. Stop. Don’t try too hard to understand. I could just listen. Just. Be a good. Was I listening or telling my own story? I couldn’t tell.

•••

Here’s a story about a threesome that went wrong. Jim keeps talking about the sex-gone-wrong like it’s the important part. And my mind is traveling.

This was a long time ago so I have nothing but perspective, which is all I ever really had even when it was happening: mine. I am just one person after all. We were three one people. Two of us, long-term lovers, thinking that we already knew each other. We didn’t know ourselves in that situation. I’m not sure I know us now, so I’m grateful that the past is pliable and lets me re-mold it according to my current understanding. This is the story that came to mind when Jim was saying, “What if we could just have a do-over? Maybe then it would all turn out okay.” Maybe then Jim wouldn’t be meeting his former partner in the park, for a walk, rather than wasting another meal he couldn’t eat after those kinds of awful conversations they have now.

My lover was an angry, jealous sort. And wow, that can take up a lot of time and supplant ease and many of the good feelings people have for one another. She perceived an interloper, interested in my affections. I rolled my eyes. Tedious. “So what if she’s hot for me?” I said about the interloper. “I can’t do anything about that.” I said. “I’m totally not into her or I’d have already done something about it!” I made a bold statement. I wouldn’t let her think she was bullying me. I’d have had sex with the interloper if I wanted to. I didn’t want to.

(My eleven-year-old son laid it down for me once, after an evening we spent with this same interloper: “You’re stupid if you don’t know she likes you.”

I replied, “I know she likes me, but what can I do about that?”

He answered with the buggy eyes of a kid who had to tolerate adult stupidity. “You could stop encouraging her!”)

So, my lover and I were on a road trip and I was starting to get pouty about the whole trip blown to hell because of her jealousy and nonsense and soon she’d go stoic and not even speak to me. But then something different happened. She said, “Okay, what if I do something else with this feeling? What if I embrace it? What if I see it for what it is: someone thinks you’re hot. Why wouldn’t she? I think you’re hot!” I brightened a bit. Could this be? She continued. “Yeah, she and I are alike enough that I could totally even see what she’s into about you. Yeah, I like her! I mean, I do actually like her. It’s not like I’m mad at her about anything. I get it. You are hot.”

Mobility was one of the things I loved about her, the ability to come up out of something tricky and think about it, move to see it another way. It had just never happened before on this theme. I was nodding, not minding at all being thought of favorably now by both of these women—the interloper and my lover, with whom I was not going to have a bad weekend after all. Then she said, “Yeah, I’m totally getting into the idea of watching her fuck you.”

“Hang on. Are you serious?” I was stunned that she’d gone straight from angry and jealous to this. She’d gone straight to watching us fuck from giving me side-eye and saying, “Never a minute’s peace with you. Every butch dyke within four hours of here comes sniffing around your porch wondering if you neeeeed anything.” That old saw exhausted me, of course, and I whined about how they never meant anything by it, but I was not sure her new turn would be an improvement.

It’s not that I’m against threesomes. I’m just not a fan. If the moment seemed right, my optimism would likely kick in again, though I’d doubt my competence. In theory, great. It seems like communication is all it takes, but meh. I’d sort of relegated threesomes to youthful experimentation. I’d experimented. I prefer connection and depth with one person, with myself, and, well, whether or not I always get those things has nothing to do with the thrill of a third person.

“But what if something amazing can be enhanced?” Jim said.

“What if it can?” I countered. “At what risk to some greater, longer-lasting peace?”

But, hey, it was fun to see her so animated about something that normally installed a rain cloud over her head. And then it was fun to speculate, with my lover, about the desires and propensities of this third person, to review the small things the lovely interloper said that were evidence of what she would think or want or like or do. And my lover and I had a good time on that trip, and good sex, and ease. That’s what I want really. Ease. Just let there be ease, kindness, affection. Of course I want good sex. Maybe I want more than I realize.

•••

Just before our fourth date in one week, the woman with trust issues asked me whether I enjoy affection, somewhat public affection. We both noted the small thrill of our legs leaning together on a previous date, in the theatre, and I was thinking about how a small thrill can take up residence and exude a larger loveliness than expected. And about how much I loved the clarity of a direct question like, “Do you enjoy public affection?” And we would be in that theatre again that very evening. I am not often one to make bold gestures, but I think, good. I have made space for her simple gestures, bold gestures. I was receptive and looking forward to affection. Quite so. I was possessed of a small thrill, just in the talking. The talking, indeed, was what had happened between us, nothing else. Yet the loveliness was large. But that night, something was off. She didn’t touch me all evening, even after asking to earlier in the day. Not even her leg leaning into mine.

•••

By the second day of our road trip, after the swimming and strolling, during the long and scenic drive toward home, my lover and I were planning to ask the interloper (who had then become the third party, or even the sweet friend) if she wanted to… you know. How will we ask her and what mood will be made of this? The planning was a small thrill, growing larger, and we were fairly sure she’d say yes. She’d been doing some work on the house and that’s why my lover became fixated on her in the first place. The two of them worked all morning on the house and I worked inside and then made lunch and the three of us ate and then they got back to work. Every evening when we were alone, my lover fixated on how the interloper looked at me and flirted. And I said, no, that kind of flirting didn’t mean anything. It was just appreciation, recognition. And my lover curled her lip in disgust.

We were planning the threesome, so sure we knew what was coming, but how on earth could we have known each other, our own minds—let alone her? We were just happy for the relief of jealousy and anger. Well, I was, and perhaps that relief made me extra hopeful, because usually I’m a think-and-talk-things-through kind of gal. And I certainly wouldn’t have wanted the interloper, our sweet friend, to be uncomfortable in any way.

I phoned while we were on the road and left a coquettish message saying how we’d been keeping company so much lately, what with the home improvements and all, and that my lover and I had been thinking about her and could we talk soon?

•••

It’s not the who’s-doing-what in bed, it seems to me as Jim talks. It’s who’s looking at whom and how. The flow of the eye contact; the flow of connection. Who feels important and why. It’s the wanting and fulfillment of desire for something that’s not just physical. I’ll accept that some people are better at these encounters than others and it seems that, for Jim, it’s gone well numerous, numerous times. He’s a directive sort, after all, and I’m sure he steers well around tight corners, maneuvers out of a cul de sac with ease. Maybe it’d be easier with three strangers, I muse, during our conversation. “No,” he says, “it’s particularly sweet when two of the people really care for each other.” I realize that I’ve never been “the third” in a threesome. I’ve always been one of the two partnered people. At some point, I’ve always thought, Why are we doing this? even if the whole thing was… nice.

•••

The interloper did indeed agree, said she felt like suddenly it was Christmas. I felt my first heart-clench of overwrought expectation.

We had a simple candlelit dinner and my lover was suave, sexy, and a bit removed. She had already turned voyeuristic. We had discussed nothing of our fantasies with our invited guest. Truth is, I’m not even sure I had my own specific fantasies. Which was strange for us. Usually I was the one steering the romance, though she was driving the sex. I smiled, winked, and beckoned with one painted fingernail; I tapped my shiny lower lip, raised an eyebrow and she leaned in for a kiss.

This was so different—her imagining and discussing the unfolding event, during our road trip. I was excited hearing all of the set up she envisioned, all of the anticipation she’d mustered. She had really talked it through and that was the thrill for me. I recalled how, when we were first together, it took her a while to get good at phone sex. I give good talk; she was more action than language.

I’d already had what I wanted. The ease. The talk. The twosome.

Did I mention I wasn’t into this woman? I wasn’t lying. That was the truth. And as soon as she was kissing me, I panicked. What the fuck kind of stupid idea was this?! And then she was kissing my lover and I swear to god my lover was having the same thought because, you know, who invited that kiss? Not me. Not her. I’ve been with women who turn into giant homophobes about the thought of a butch-on-butch kiss. That wasn’t it exactly, but what was it? And what was happening to my lover and her assertiveness? As we moved to the bed, as if on a conveyor belt, I was already thinking how to maneuver into the driver’s seat. We were careening out of control. I didn’t know how weird things had gotten for my lover until she looked at me, stricken, with the interloper kissing down her back, and mouthed, “Help.”

Oh, this is good, I thought. And then I started noticing the interloper’s energy and how she would turn to me ravenous, then back to my lover, perfunctory, and I said, “Hey, let me just put words on the dynamic here. I’m not sure there’s a charge happening between the two of you in the same way that both of you have a charge for me.” And it was like I’d just given two magnets permission to fly apart—but when they both instantly attached onto me with a powerful zeal, I thought, lord help me, what have I done? And who were these sniveling cowards I was in bed with anyway? Neither one of them had any voice of her own.

“I just didn’t want you to feel left out,” said the interloper to my lover and they practically shook hands, all forgiven.

It’s also true that I felt a sweet protective feeling toward my lover. And that’s not totally hot. And then there they were, like a hundred hands and mouths and, okay, she didn’t know me, but Jesus, do not bite my nipples. Too much was happening at once.

And maybe it’s this: Nothing they were doing was about me. It was about them, only not really that either. It was about some idea of each other, and some idea of me and some idea I had about ease. And they’d have just carried on, only I’m not keen to be the vessel for something in which I’m not really participating, and so I sat up and said, “I’m very sorry, but this isn’t working for me.” And I stood up and started putting on a bit of clothing, just enough to be clear, polite. I was apologizing and my lover sat back to watch me do my thing. She knew me and respected my voice, my sexual intuition, and my sense of things. She often took my lead because she trusted it.

We went back to the table and I served dessert and what could we say? Our interloper was apologizing and re-strategizing and trying to get us all back to bed. And I was done. My lover had gone back to her stoic observer role, waiting for me to find the kind and comfortable way out of all this. She was definitely still in her sexuality, but like a vacuum-packed container of her sexual self—no scent of anything, nothing in the package to be affected by the outside air. I knew we’d be doin’ it when the interloper left, and the trouble was, the interloper knew it too. She was hurt and felt excluded because she had been. And not just by me.

I’m not sure what happened between the two of them, but they remained friends in the coming months, became closer even, as they sat on the porch and drank beer, my lover affectionate toward me, the interloper a bit chilly to me when she’d say hello or goodbye. It took years before the interloper and I were on truly good terms.

•••

I’ve learned this lesson before, in childhood, and how many times since? The person who finds the voice stands to lose the relationships. And I’m always trying to grow up enough to find the kindness in the voice. I still stand to lose, even as I soften so my voice doesn’t sound like, “Well, fuck you, at least I’m still standing.”

My date said those trust issues weren’t about me and that was some small relief, but she didn’t want to keep dating me either. Those issues influenced how close I could be to her. I’m still drawn to her, and yet I cannot come near. What use is the attraction? There’s some meaning in that word, isn’t there? Attraction. Something magnetic, like metal, wood, blood, the scent of sex or purpose. Does purpose have a scent? Does sex have a scent before it happens? Everything contains its opposite too: repulsion. I read once that organically occurring perfumes, like those containing wood or flowers, will always be more compelling to humans than synthetic scents. Synthetic scents are all good-smell. The natural ones also contain feces and decay.

“I’m definitely attracted you. This is all new territory for me,” my date said. “I enjoy/adore you and for whatever reason…” She didn’t remain compelled. Or maybe it was that she felt more compelled to withdraw. Not my business to know.

Something was in decay; stillborn. And I was suspiciously eyeing her. Her inability to remain true to a simple attraction made her seem untrustworthy, and somehow, more interesting. Is that even true? Maybe it’s more trustworthy to actually see a person’s errant whims and fears, rather than them being hidden. Such strange start-stop inconsistencies and fear-pleasure combinations. I was noting the inconsistencies—in her and in me too. Single. Separate. Still interested. Irritated. Accepting. Still engaged and observing.

Scent triggers memory. Who am I to her and she to me? And what do I care if some stranger doesn’t want to date me any more? The body wants complexity, not just the good. I am attracted to sweet-clear-something-not-quite-right-complexity, already waking up in the warm puddle of it, though alone.

•••

My life is good. I am alone. In the hammock, I’m listening with interest to Jim’s story about his recent loss of love. “We didn’t communicate enough,” he said.

And I said, “It sounds like you communicated all the time; you just didn’t want the same things.”

He disagreed, and we carried on discussing the terrain of speaking and listening and sometimes deciding to do what doesn’t feel right, or what feels right in the moment but you know it won’t be later.

Jim said, “He knew it would hurt me to leave with the guy from the threesome, and he did it anyway. He even acknowledged it later. He knew he could’ve simply stopped and connected with me and then called that guy afterward if he was going to do that. That would’ve been unpleasant, but not the same as leaving with him, barely a goodbye to me.”

I sighed at the pain of this. “It wasn’t the lack of communication.” I said. “It was the follow-through.”

Now my date and I only communicate via email. All this speaking and listening and writing and reading, and my erotic body doesn’t understand why it’s been left out of the conversation. The body is how I know things, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned from this odd bit of dating, my mind shouldn’t be in charge. It’s too unstable and is far too fond of its own notions. If I’d been Jim, I would’ve wanted a kiss, touch, and fondness, too, before my lover left the house. That scenario makes me want to cry. More zeal for a stranger than kindness for an intimate. More desire to stay separate from someone significant than to risk being close. Even knowing what made sense, Jim’s lover couldn’t do it. Even with so much spark and talk and enthusiasm, my date decided that even kissing me once, just to find out what attraction was there, would be too much.

Whether it’s three, two, or just one person, we learn the shifting terrain of love and sex slowly with a combination of fear and pleasure. Never the same river twice. New bodies and stories bring new meaning.

But the mind can maintain the same river, step into it the same way, again and again. The mind can make pleasure or fear, depending on what it expects, creates, endures.

I told a friend about the dates gone wrong and she said, “Don’t push the river.”

“I’m impatient.” I replied. “I want to know what’s possible; what’s not.”

I also know this: Love listens and is patient. Fear wants speedy resolution and will get all up in someone’s business to find relief. I have trust issues. But why would a person let that shit win?

I pose no threat. I am more thoughtful and communicative than most. I know the importance of sex. Consistency and tenderness help me overcome fear. That’s my story. Jim is also kind and thoughtful and yet, when he said, “no more,” his partner was wrecked and angry, devoured by loss. We inhabit a shifting terrain and come to know it intimately, no matter whom we keep at arm’s length. Distance just placates the mind and keeps pleasure at bay. Managing a bit of hunger can seem better than feeling sated and vulnerable. And why not? It’s all just a story.

I know what I want, and there’s risk in it but not too much. I will almost always choose the risk of two, probably not three or more. I am fairly content with one. Jim and I are talking about communication, and that means memory and longing and whether what we want can match up with our abilities to achieve it. When I’m confused, the body tells me when to hang on, when to let go, when to stand up and put my clothes on. That’s my story. I trust that wanting means I’m alive. It’s good to be alive. I rely on the beauty of being able to stand up again after feeling broken. So far, that’s what’s always happened.

There’s wisdom in optimism. That’s my story.

•••

KIMBERLY DARK is a writer, teacher, and storyteller who wants you to remember that we are creating the world even as it creates us. Read and gawk and learn at www.kimberlydark.com.

Woman Versus Compliments

anxiety weight loss — By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Becca Schuh

One of my favorite professors from college stood five feet away from me, staring at me as though I was a minor celebrity she was trying to place. An off-off Broadway show? The bassist in an obscure girl band?

“Becca?! Is that you?!” She seemed genuinely shocked. “You look so different, you look so … professional.”

I admired her word choice. Most people were not so quickly able to exercise discretion. Almost everyone else who commented on the changes in my appearance over the last year went for the obvious: You look so thin. You’ve lost so much weight.

They weren’t wrong. Between the summers of 2014 and 2015, I lost around twenty pounds, not a small sum on my five-foot frame. Chipmunk cheeks became cheekbones, flabby arms turned muscular, an obviously round stomach was now relatively flat.

Also in that year, I worked over fifty hours per week at a brunch restaurant where each plate weighed ten pounds. I went from eating five meals a day to one or two—a meal at the restaurant and some granola bars at home. I decided to move across the country. And, for eight of the months of that year, the time during which I lost the majority of the weight, I was in the throes of an intense resurgence of the anxiety disorder that has affected me, on and off, since I was a child.

I did not simply lose weight because I was anxious. Panic made me eat less, made me move more. I began running; at first I didn’t count the miles. But when the sun-drenched blocks stretched long enough that they began to seem countable, I did, and then the miles ticked up—three, five, seven. Those runs were one of the only things that helped my jilted brain.

People came up with many creative ways of expressing their approval over my new look. You are so slim now! How did you do it? They loved to talk about it, as though it were a pop culture phenomenon or a collective accomplishment. You look the way we’ve always wanted you to look. People that I did not realize ever thought about me came out of the woodwork to comment—friends’ parents, friends’ coworkers that I’d met once, the boyfriends of my own coworkers.

There were things in life that I had not necessarily loved but that had been easy and joyful: eating, sitting, chilling. These are things that normal people do, and they provide contentment.

The clearer it became in my mind that I was not normal, the harder it was to take pleasure in these simple acts of joy. Innocuous comments thrown out in conversation at a bar would send me nearly to tears, and I could sense the discomfort in my companion’s voices as they tried to carry on a normal discussion. Standing in the kitchen overhearing the banter of my roommate and her boyfriend made me twitch, I started hoarding cups of water in my room so I wouldn’t have to listen to their easy comfort. If I was so strange that even my friends recoiled from my bare emotions, why should I be allowed to partake in the simple pleasure of cooking and eating a meal? If I was to be barred from the intimacy that others found so easily, why did I deserve contentment?

And yet, despite all these connections my brain made, the weight was separate. I didn’t notice it until it was gone. I had never seen myself as fat, so now I did not see myself as thin. I was the same. My pants were looser, my cheeks were gaunter, but I was the same.

Only to everyone else was I different.

I didn’t notice that I was thinner, but I noticed other changes: I noticed that I was no longer laughing, I was no longer eating, I was no longer able to sit and think without my breath quickening and my chest hurting. I spoke in shorter sentences, if at all. Nervous tics sprouted, my eyes darted around every room. If people could notice weight off my midsection, I’m sure they could notice the changes in my personality as well. But all I heard was this: You look slim. You look different. You look healthy.

I probably am healthier, physically at least. A person who is capable of running four, then six, then eventually ten miles is likely healthier than a person who cannot run one before giving up and going home to eat hot Cheetos.

As a byproduct of the anxiety, I became a person who was able to run four, then six, then eventually ten miles. I didn’t suddenly love running. But I could no longer do the things I loved—painting, writing, sitting in bed and eating a snack. I couldn’t sit stationary without screaming or crying, without nearly imperceptible shrill noises of fear coming out of my mouth. I had to move. I had to run.

People loved to hear about the running, too. I’d always been a sloth. You couldn’t get me out of bed before dinner on a Sunday in college. If my sorority did a 5k run for charity, I walked. The weight loss and the running were the favorite conversational fodder of acquaintances and friends alike that spring. But I didn’t need to talk about running or about my weight. I needed to talk about my anxiety. They did not love to hear about my anxiety.

If it’s that bad, even if you’re exercising and eating healthy, you just need to get a therapist. But I have a therapist. Then you should go on medication. Nobody wants to hear you talk about how upset you are this much.

It’s just, kind of boring, okay? You aren’t interesting when you’re like this.

Of course, the unspoken words were louder than these comments. The friends who I normally texted back and forth with all day suddenly weren’t responding. I used to go out with friends every Friday and Saturday, and I found myself at home curled in bed at eleven, realizing I’d never been contacted about the bars that they were Instagramming from. Eventually I heard the complaints about me through the grapevine, a chorus that I couldn’t hear: Why is she like this? Does she do this to you, too?

And I get it. Dealing with someone with manic anxiety is frustrating. I know incredible people, so I firmly believe that this discrepancy was not intentional, but nevertheless it disturbs me that nearly everyone in my life had more to say about my weight loss than my obvious personality changes due to the anxiety. They were happy to discuss how different I looked (Not that you looked bad before…), but when I tried to reach out for help with my addled brain, people recoiled. I don’t blame anyone for this—I didn’t want to deal with myself, so why would anyone else? But again, the discrepancy is startling, is scary, is something that deserves to be known.

I want to reiterate: I love the people in my life, I blame them for nothing. I understand that it was easier to concentrate on the socially acceptable (a thin body) than the taboo (a ravaged mind).

I can’t claim lack of culpability. Part of me relishes the compliments that I look better than I ever have (Not that you weren’t good looking before…) Especially now that my anxiety has fallen to the flow of a nearly dry creek, trickling along, whereas before it roared like an ocean. I’m able to appreciate that more men want to sleep with me, that more clothes fit, that I look better in the clothes I buy. Pictures are more flattering, and I’m asked to model the new uniform at work.

Now, you look like a small person. Well, you were always a small person but, you know…

And I do know. I do know what she means. Before, I was short in stature, but I was not truly small. And the culture loves a small woman. I’ve never been able to reap the benefits—nothing about me is small. I talk loudly, I talk too much. My personality ricochets off the walls instead of staying in a neat box. I’ve always taken up far more space than is allotted for a woman. Now that my body seems to fit into that space, even if my words and actions do not, I occasionally get to cash in on the rigged pleasure that the slot machine of society delivers. It is not a large pleasure; it is not the pleasure I feel when having the first long conversation with a new friend, when completing a piece of writing, when meeting a woman I admire. It’s a sick one, like a fifth drink when you know you should already be walking home, like reading old emails from an ex-lover.

I don’t blame anyone for being afraid of my anxiety. When my brain enters the place it was living in last spring, it’s frustrating, it’s intoxicating, it comes alive like a virus that can mutate anything into a curse. If we lived in a different cultural climate, I might be able to work myself into anger at my friends, but I can’t. It isn’t their fault that we are taught to fear a woman who is seemingly crazed with her thoughts. I can’t find fault with anybody I know because all of us are taught to praise a woman for dropping pounds off of her body like hail in March and to shun her for letting words of anxiety and fear exit her mouth at the same frequency.

I know that I’m not the only woman I know who has felt such intense anxiety, but no one has ever come to me in the state in which I tried to reach people last spring. Is it because my anxiety is outsized, abnormal, problematic? Or is it because others were taught better than I to hold it inside, to only contact appropriate outlets? I want to say now what I have never said aloud. Please, come to me if you are ever so afraid that you cannot breathe, cannot speak, can only cry.

I don’t want people to be afraid of complimenting me on my appearance. I love hearing that I’m having a good hair day as much as the next person. What I want is for people to not be afraid of telling me that I look good, but to also not be afraid of telling me that I seem bad. Of asking me if I am all right. Because I was not all right. Although I feel stronger in some ways for pulling myself out of that hole alone, I also yearn for the feeling of floundering in the trenches with the people I love and knowing that we can show each other the messiest parts of ourselves, not just the thin ones that fit into the smallest spaces.

How to stop the fear of the anxious woman? I don’t know, but I want to try. I can’t stop anyone else from turning away from the ruminating thoughts turned into monologues, the wide eyes, the tears that are louder than anyone is comfortable hearing. But I can turn into it when I see those signs in others, and ask, attempt to ask, despite the fear: Please, tell me the truth: are you all right?

•••

BECCA SCHUH is a writer living in Brooklyn by way of Southern California and Madison, Wisconsin. Her work has recently appeared in the Washington Post, The Rumpus, and the Soundings Review. She is a graduate of the Johnston Center for Integrative Studies at the University of Redlands. Follow her on Twitter @TamingofdeSchuh.

I’m with the Band

[This is kind of art you get when your editor is a former band geek. —ed.]

By Rebecca Stetson Werner

In the enormous domed metal building—a cavernous space dominated by three regulation size basketball courts where adults coach the kids’ teams, shouting to be heard above the din—I find the court for Nicholas’s game and quickly sit down on the bleachers. Every once in a while, a dissonant buzzer shrieks, so awful a sound, so jarring it makes my scalp tingle, and I curl in on myself in anticipation of the next blast.

Nicholas’s good friend passes him the ball. He catches it, sort of, but his grip is not quite firm enough, and it barrels on through his hands and down onto his shoe, bouncing out of bounds. I hear a groan and a snicker from somewhere to my left. I fight the desire to turn and glare at the person. Nicholas smiles, forcedly, and I see him apologize to his friend.

Then he throws me a pained look. Hoping to communicate with him as the one person in the crowd who knows and holds his vulnerability, I try to return my best version of what proves to be an impossible expression: a blend of a smirk moving into a softening around the eyes and then a goofy grin, with a bit of a shoulder shrug.

But I am not sure I get the expression right, and I may have missed my chance to connect and communicate with him. Because today, from the moment I entered the arena, I have retreated to the sidelines, taken a stance as an outsider. I am tense, self-conscious, distracted, and frustrated with those around me.

While all the other parents on the bleachers chat and yell and gesture and growl, I am caught up in my own head, spinning through a series of questions. When did this happen? How did we get here? When did we stop wanting our children to play nicely together, stop insisting on apologies when they hurt one another, stop valuing kindness and social skills above competitiveness and drive? And when did it become a good play to foul someone on purpose? When did we stop calling careful with that stick across the playground and start shouting check him?

“Out of the paint!” one parent bellows. Another shouts, “Boards!” every time a player shoots. I have no idea what they mean and wonder if I may be eavesdropping on a bizarre carpentry-focused reality show. I amuse myself for a bit by trying to overlay this crowd’s behavior onto a playground scene from when our children were younger. I imagine what it would have been like to sit on the benches next to the swings with coffee cups in our hands, interrupting one friend’s narration of her clogged mammary gland to shout to one of our kids: Swing harder! Pump those legs! Come on, work those monkey bars! Share those Cheerios!

I’m tempted to turn to the parents beside me on these bleachers and offer an explanation for myself: I was in the band.

•••

In high school, I was a band geek, although there were lots of other, less kind names for members of this motley gang of musicians. On Friday nights, when the popular kids would sit in the bleachers with their French fries and sodas and cheer for their friends on the football team, I was there, too. But off to the side, clad in a royal-blue polyester men’s uniform, helmet perched atop my head, its plumes long ago snapped in half, yellowed, or simply lost.

On school days, I stood when the intercom called for the pep rally participants to go to the gym, and I left the room with all the Blue Knights in team jerseys and school colors. In the gymnasium, however, I was absent from the groupings of chairs in the center of the polished wood floors. Instead, I sat First Chair, adjusting my piccolo to a well-tuned B flat and offering it to each member of the pep band. Then I’d sit down again and await our turn to accompany the cheerleaders and play our school’s fight song.

And it wasn’t just pep band. I could also be counted on to maintain the spacing and pace of the most complex marching band formations, my whole row guiding left toward me, peering across the music holders affixed to their bent elbows. In the two-person pit orchestra, I routinely covered three woodwind instruments during school musicals, and would lean across the flute, piccolo, and oboe that lay in my lap so that I could reach the keys of the synthesizer. I must admit: I am a bit embarrassed for myself right now as I write this. Total nerd. But these musical talents did help me pass a bit socially, counterbalancing my polyester uniform and allowing me to relate to the jocks and popular kids. Sadly, these impressive skills were not sufficient to produce a flurry of prom invitations.

At some point during high school, I began singing, a sensible extension of my musical activities. Although some of my most important relationships were formed through singing groups, I never felt completely at ease in the choirs I joined. So I wasn’t surprised when, after her school choir concert, our daughter Julia unintentionally voiced what I also struggled with when singing. I asked her what it had felt like to be on stage, to stand before an audience.

“Well, I liked it when I played the xylophone,” she said. “I knew what to do with my hands. I didn’t know what to do with them when I was singing.”

Like me, it seems, Julia may be an instrumentalist at heart. I was accustomed to holding and playing instruments on stage, to having something protective between me and the audience. I often carried my black cases with me to keep my instruments warm enough, or because they didn’t fit in my locker, also conveniently giving my hands purpose as I moved through my school’s crowded hallways. I used to practice fingerings for scales on my desktop. It gave me something to do while I chatted with the more gregarious kids before classes began. Even now, when I am feeling nervous, my adult fingers long for the feeling of my oboe’s cold wood and silver. I can still call forth the smell of cedar and beeswax and saliva wafting up into my face as I open the case. I can even hear the creaking of the hinge as it opened and the snapping shut of the lid to my reed box. I mentally run my finger down the turkey feather I used to swab my oboe dry after I played.

But singing? As Julia said, it’s just you and your voice on the stage. But I pushed through this unease, this vulnerability, for whatever reason, and it led to something, someone, for me.

•••

My husband, Jonathan, and I met in our college’s choir. He was a dancer and a singer in high school. He tells me of an awkward stage involving leg warmers and acne medication and asking a friend when football rehearsal was over. When we met on his first day of college, I was his assigned greeter, or what we called a hand holder, sitting with him while he waited to audition for the choir that I had already joined. What I noticed about Jonathan—after overcoming my fascination with his strange fashion choices, including a do rag, white t-shirt, tightly cinched pants and shirt cuffs—was that, though I was there to make him feel less nervous as he waited, he was not nervous at all.

The next time we met was in the basement storage room of the performing arts center. I, in my role as choir manager, was responsible for fitting the newly selected men for their tuxedos. This was my first time measuring inseams for men’s attire, and Jonathan, third in line, intervened. Clearly I looked as confused and mortified as I felt, awkwardly holding a measuring tape, trying to figure out how I was going to determine pant lengths for all these young men I did not yet know. “Have him hold the top, and you hold the bottom down by his ankle,” he suggested.

Ah. Ankle. That’s good. I can handle ankles.

But I think the night that our relationship moved from friendship to more than that was at the famed a cappella karaoke night. That evening, we sang each other’s songs. Which is not a euphemism. We actually sang each other’s solos from our respective a cappella groups. There were a lot of red plastic Solo cups in people’s hands that night, though not in his or mine.

He actually volunteered to sing my song, confidently and in full voice, which was a folky Tuck and Patty love song. Jonathan knows how to work a room. But I was then involuntarily pushed up to the front of the crowd as his group began the accompaniment to his signature song, “The Reflex” by Duran Duran. He typically performed with full choreography, and there was clearly some expectation that I would shimmy along with his group as they boogied down. I was completely terrified and uncomfortable and breathless and uncool and not at all uninhibited by the contents of a Solo cup. Yet he stood in the middle of the crowd and mouthed the words for me, smiling warmly the whole time.

In that moment of my vulnerability and his strength, my discomfort and his ease, and during many other moments in the next few years in which we flipped and flopped roles of lending support and revealing weaknesses, our friendship grew into understanding of and love for each other. We were able to give each other what we needed when working through our most difficult, most vulnerable moments.

There was the night, sitting in the middle of our college’s clay tennis courts, in which he—overwhelmed by his work and the high expectations and his exhaustion—confessed, “I’m not going to be able to do this.” And I told him he could, and we did. Together. We created our us and, eventually, our family. We sang Tuck and Patty while rocking our babies years later. And our kids still think we are so weird when we lapse into the fle-fle-fle-fle-flex refrain on road trips.

Back then, we didn’t think about selecting someone who had skills that complemented the other’s. We didn’t anticipate the need to tackle our own home improvements or the requirement that we support all of the different homework subjects. Or that one person’s musicality should be rounded out by the other’s athleticism. And therefore, given our poorly planned love, our house is repaired with duct tape and the kitchen faucet drips. Yet we have inadvertently managed to rock the homework subject coverage at the kitchen counter. And, although our three children each fall in their own unique place on the continuum between gregarious and introverted, luckily, between Jonathan and I, we truly understand them.

Yet without question, our weakest collective skill set is athleticism. Jonathan is a self-described great blue heron with sore knees when asked to assume an athletic stance. And I am awkward and clumsy and often find it difficult to walk across a room without tripping. Of course, as with home improvement and homework coverage, engineering well-rounded genetic loading for one’s potential offspring is not typically how one goes about choosing a mate. One is much more likely to be drawn to another who likes the same things, someone who also shows up to the same a cappella karaoke event.

•••

This us, Jonathan and I. What we know from experience, despite our lack of sports expertise, is the importance of allowing oneself to feel and express one’s vulnerability. And we know the importance of where you place yourself in a crowd. As a couple, we are the result of the push and pull of social dynamics playing out while two people connected amidst a crowd’s pulse and noise. And we know how coming together—finding each other through an extended moment across the room—can evolve into a life together. A dance in which two people stop synchronizing themselves with those around them and fall into their own rhythm. Jonathan and I? We wish for nothing more than these moments, these connections, for our children.

Lately, I have been returning to that nervous, uncertain glance Nicholas shot me across the basketball court. About who I was, or perhaps wasn’t, for him in that moment. And about how Nicholas saw me, sitting among the spectators as well, caught up in my wonder at how our children are getting older and at how parenting requirements change with time. I lost sight of how this is all still about the connections, about forming the closest and strongest relationships we can with each other, relationships during our childhood serving as a springboard for embracing and moving out into the rest of the world. I want to change how I receive his searching look when it next comes my way. Though I know this will not always be the case, our children are still young enough that their raw and vulnerable glances are still directed at me.

Nicholas’s glance has also sent me back into my memory of that moment, albeit a more grown-up moment, between Jonathan and me so many years ago. Of the feeling of finding Jonathan across the crowd. And how that look moved us forward, shored us up, and helped us live. And the desire for connection with Jonathan is still there. I still hope for our eyes not to pass over each other, searching through the mess of parenting and work and distraction and stress. For our eyes to meet and linger, for this look to make the noise around us quiet. Once these intense and precious few days of parenting these beings has shifted and they move outward, that Jonathan and I will still be us, still finding each other, as the crowd thins and moves on. And for our growing children to see this, to know we are in the crowd for them now and for each other, available and strong. And for them to someday find this for themselves with another.

•••

REBECCA STETSON WERNER lives in Portland, Maine, with her husband and three children. She has contributed to Taproot and Grounded Magazine; this is her second essay for Full Grown People. She writes about parenting, children’s books, and life in their very old home at treetoriver.com.