Poly Living Conference Part Six: What Have We Learned from This?

After Amy picked me up from the snuggle party, I sobbed my face off all the way home. I was saying things like “But all those people are so nice! I’m just not good enough for them!” Amy tried to argue as she always does, but mostly she just listened. We watched Zooey Deschanel host SNL up until the news, then went to bed.

The next day, I cried some more, and it felt like it was coming right out of my heart. It felt like productive crying, similar to the way it feels when you’ve finished some particularly unpleasant homework. Transformative, kind of.

Here’s a list of what I got out of the experience I’ve just spent so many paragraphs on:

1. I love those books where the author spends a year doing something special and then writes about it. This blog was inspired by one of those, The Happiness Project, but my favorite is Helping Me Help Myself, by Beth Lisick. This feels like the beginning of one of those projects.

For the rest of the year, I’m going to enjoy a reasonable number of sex-positive body adventures and write as much as I can about them. They won’t all go on here, so feel free to write me for the location of this blog’s id, if you don’t already know.

2. Happiness, self-worth, and sex-goddess-hood are so close and will do so much for me and for Amy, but to get there I’ll need to surround myself with poly and poly-friendly people more often. I need to follow my body’s advice to make everything better, and that means community building first.

3. I need to not approach community-building from a caretaking standpoint—I need to let the community take care of me for a while. I’m sure I’ll have plenty of chances to give back later on.

4. Amy and I are strong and amazing. I’m proud of the way we’ve worked to reinvent marriage for ourselves, the way every couple really does. It’s like a miracle.

5. The snuggle party helped me confront some of my fears and let them go. I think it’s so cool how that happens sometimes. Though it isn’t good to date your fears, of course, I’m glad of all of the Jungian characters who’ve come into my life and somehow helped me to see and love my shadow self, to confront my hang-ups, limits, and flaws and hopefully sometimes let them go.  Special thanks to all the good/bad influences, though in the future, I’d mostly just like to have fun.