Engagement :)

I'm sure it's old news to everyone who reads this, but E and I got engaged a few weeks ago. We have a provisional date booked - July 14th 2012 - and the beginnings of a format. The civil partnership ceremony will take place in our Hertfordshire town, in the local registry office's larger ceremony room, followed by a big party at a community centre not far away. We're doing it all on a budget and enjoying finding creative ways to save.

Some things we've already discovered:
- The problem with wedding dresses is that they are intended to make the wearer the centre of attention... a problem when you've got two brides! We are solving that by going with non-traditional dresses, but that's the last I'll be saying about our dresses until after the wedding. They are a surprise!

- Photographers' websites are awful and the worse the website, the more expensive the photographer.

- All of our local florists order their wedding flowers from Interflora and therefore have exactly the same range. We're going to have to go in and talk to them about bespoke arrangements.

- How hard is it to get flat wedding invites these days? I don't want to post ribbon bows and crystals to Australia!

- Our plan for inexpensive catering is making me very happy.

- People are lovely and so far no-one has done a double-take at the Civil Partnership deal (and some suppliers actively advertise their willingness to service them).

The wedding's still more than 10 months away so the planning is in its early stages, but I'll be sure to keep you all updated as my adventures progress. It's not every day one gets to plan a lesbian wedding!

Scare Factor

A while back, E and I discovered that we have an odd hobby in common. It essentially consists of looking at photos and accounts of ghost sightings until we frighten ourselves almost to the point of illness, then needing to look at Cute Overload or something until the sick-with-fear feeling goes away.

We know it's silly. We don't even believe in ghosts particularly. Neither is the point :P

This predilection for scary stories led me to spend almost an hour on Friday in a tiny Hertfordshire village library perusing the ghosts of towns throughout the county, which left me primed for what happened on Saturday.

We were up in Birmingham for E's university graduation. We had been up very early, endured a long train trip, sat through a long ceremony, ate a very satisfying repast then trundled all through Birmingham's city centre including seeing the Staffordshire Hoard in the museum (which was awesome, btw). We rounded it off with an attempt to visit the cathedral, which was closed. So, there were were, strolling back through the churchyard towards the station, exhausted from our day and really wanting to be home already. I spotted the grave of a little boy who had died aged two, murmured sadly over it, then moved to the next one... only to have teeny toddler hands appear on either side of the headstone.

o_O

I only blithered for a moment or two before I realised that they were the hands of an actual child playing hide and seek...

Note to self: no more scaring for a while!

Lesbian

A few people have privately pinged me about the fact that my info, both here and elsewhere, now says 'lesbian' instead of 'bisexual'.

A lot of pondering went into that change. I identified as bisexual for eleven years (secretly for the first ten years) so it is a label that I had come to find comfortable. However, the more I thought about it the more inaccurate and inadequate it became. Similarly, although I used to feel ambivalent about the exotic, othering 'lesbian' label, it had become familiar and I was ready to accept it. Identifying as bisexual felt wrong, while the lesbian label felt right.

The kinds of questions I'm being asked about this are: Have you changed from a bisexual to a lesbian? Or were you a lesbian all along? If so, what about that 10-year string of heterosexual relationships?

They're good questions, and I have been trying to answer them myself. It's difficult to consider one's own past objectively, but I have tried to be at least critical of my experience so that I can answer accurately.

It's true that until this year I believed I was attracted to men as well as women. I was convinced of this despite all available evidence, that being that my relationships with men routinely sucked and were devoid of physical and emotional satisfaction. (Yes, I do mean all of them. Sorry, any exes reading this, but them's the breaks. And really, if you're smart enough to read this blog you must have realised just how badly matched we were). I persisted with the pursuit of a safe, respectable heterosexual relationship despite proving to myself time and time again that they just didn't work for me. There were other issues at play in some of my poor partner choices - emotional baggage not related to my sexuality - but normalcy was part of it. I didn't want to rock the boat, so I kept on trying, one disaster after another.

I don't think I was ever truly bisexual. The frequency and potency of my attraction to women has been largely unchanged since my childhood (even when I thought I was just desiring a close friendship) and it has blossomed since I accepted that this is the only way for me. Without the red herring of "needing" a normal heterosexual relationship I can't imagine why I ever wanted one in the first place!

I'm wearing the 'lesbian' label with pride and joy today, where once it used to both frighten and tantalise. And I am very, very happy to own that element of myself. It feels like coming home.

Yes, yes, update...

Sorry it's been so long... I've been mired down in marking assessments and writing job applications, so getting a blog post out has seemed nearly impossible.

Today I'm just sitting around exhausted because I've spent the afternoon doing a demo lesson and being interviewed for a teaching position which, I learned an hour later, I didn't get. I'm not too disappointed - it was only my first interview of the job-hunting season, and I had very positive feedback despite not quite squeaking in to the position on offer. But I feel a bit deflated and thus blogging seems more appealing than the big pile of marking in my bag!

So... what's new...

E and I are moving in together in July/August, hence the job search. My current position ends at the close of the summer term, and it makes much better financial sense for me to move to her town rather than for her to move to London. I hate job applications and the whole process is making me quite fretful and cross, especially as I have to deal with the awkwardness of taking days off to go to interviews. I'm spending a lot of time quite exhausted and dreary, and can't wait for the half-term break next week. It will be a real relief to be getting all these things done without actual work getting in the way! I have piles of marking to do and reports to write and IEPs to renew and ARGH.

The good news is I've lost a stone and I'm back in size 14 clothes for the first time since I was about 23. I'm feeling rather good about that! Two stone to go (a stone is 14lb/6.3kg, for those not familiar with this quaint yet satisfying English unit of weight).

I have no inflammation according to the blood tests, so I'm just working on easing the pain at the moment. I need to go back to the doctor for another physio referral and to find out why the muscles in my upper arms have suddenly turned bumpy, but I think I'll now wait until I move to do that. For the time being, it's going alright.

So everything's ticking along, and hopefully I will manage not to drop with exhaustion before the summer holidays hit...

Pain

Who remembers those magic eye images that sprang into popularity in the early 90s? I had the original book - still do somewhere. You see what looks like a chaotic, repeating set of colours without meaning, then suddenly, after staring hard or going unfocused or wiggling the page in and out, the thing springs into 3D and suddenly you can see the raised image superimposed on the collage. Magic!

The point of this analogy is largely that I like analogies ;)

But more to the point, sometimes things that occur in our lives are like background colour, meaningless and unconnected until someone points out what's really there, and the real image becomes starkly obvious.

I have struggled with recurring neck/shoulder/upper back pain since I was a child. As a 9-year-old I was tested and prodded over bad headaches which were eventually cured with some physiotherapy on my neck. Not long after this, I suffered my first frozen shoulder, a condition that was to recur regularly (I can't think of a year that went by without at least one - some so bad that my shoulders were at uneven heights for days, this still in primary school!). I can remember from this age also having trouble adopting relaxed postures when sitting. I was stiff, I couldn't just flop without getting sore.

In my late teens I began supermarket checkout work to fund my uni years, and the problems moved from occasional to perpetual. Frozen shoulders, deep pain in my shoulder and neck joints, aches and pains. A hand injury when I was 20 exacerbated this with six months of slings and awkward postures.

Since then it's never got any better. A decade of struggling with pillows, trying out ergonomic chairs and always facing the speaker with my body because turning my head to look would get me painfully stuck that way. Dozens of attempts to sort out conditions that would soothe rather than inflame. I had physio from time to time when it got particularly bad, but with health insurance that only covered part of the fee I was never able to pursue this for very long (and besides, regular readers will know how good at asking for help I'm not). Last year a particularly bad flare-up during more supermarket work led me to spend several hundreds on physiotherapy gap payments, which made some progress with that particular crisis, but did nothing for the overall ongoing issue.

Recently, I had another bad episode, and woke up suddenly to the fact that most people aren't in constant shoulder and neck pain. They actually aren't. And maybe I shouldn't be either. Maybe I could not be.

So, I went to the doctor and got a physio referral. This physio took a proper history, felt my shoulders and neck and back, and was somewhat horrified. The soreness and stiffness is more widespread than even I'd realised, and is in the joints as well as the muscles. From the base of my skull to my waist, from one shoulder joint to the other, the whole thing is sore.

The physio sent me away with exercises, but said that if they didn't work I should come back in a few weeks and he would refer me for blood tests to look for inflammation markers; he believes that given the widespread nature of the soreness this might be something medical rather than mechanical.

This freaked me out somewhat, but I realised that since it's been ongoing for so long it's unlikely to be something that's going to progress to a serious illness. Then again, that too is daunting - if it's a chronic illness of some sort it could be grimly insoluble in its own way. But I swallowed my panic, and went off and dutifully did the two simple exercises prescribed as often as possible each day. And for a couple of weeks all was going well - my shoulders actually seemed to be getting better. Then, 12 days after the appointment, I had two days of severe headaches, and the next day got another frozen neck. Since then I've been back to square one - ongoing pain and stiffness at all times, burning pain in my shoulder, stiffness in my neck. :(

The follow-up appointment is tomorrow, and I'm trying to feel calm and reassured about what I'm going to have to do. I need to be my own advocate tomorrow: to make sure the physio understands that I did do the exercises and that the problem recurred regardless; and that I want to pursue the medical avenue, even if it comes to nothing, so that I can be sure. I will need to be firm, not be bullied, stand up for myself. This isn't easy for me.

However, I think I've reached a point where I'd prefer the emotional trauma of sticking up for myself to the ongoing pain. I can't keep living like this. I can't keep putting up with it. I can't live the life I want to live with a complex and debilitating set of muscle problems. It has got to stop.

So, wish me luck for tomorrow, as I tackle the medical profession head-on and give myself half a chance at a pain-free life.

I couldn't see the chronic pain for what it was until I looked at it from a different angle. I'm determined not to unsee it again.

Faith, equality and deception

Yesterday I had my first ever English parents' night. 28 parent interviews at 5-minute intervals. It was a long night, but mostly positive, and with some insights and breakthroughs that have put me on rather a high.

However, the process got me thinking a lot about what one tells others about oneself. The parents told me (probably unconsciously) many little facts about themselves and their family life during the interviews. I shared the occasional relevant thing about myself as well, but I found myself constantly on guard about what I felt I should not reveal.

I'm "out" at work to the staff - they all know that I have a girlfriend, and so far as most of them know, I'm only into girls. No one has a problem with it, and although I get a little bit of excess curiosity from the older staff members, generally it passes without comment (or with only friendly comments). I have not talked about my faith at work, and I deliberately choose not to wear pentacles/trees of life etc around my neck. Lesbian they can probably deal with, lesbian witch might be too much.

But, I would never have hesitated to wear a cross or a St Christopher...

I am careful not to out myself to the parents, either as a lesbian or as a pagan. On my class ethnicities list, two sets of parents identified as 'no religion' and one as Hindu, and the remainder are equally divided between Christian and Muslim. About half of the Christian kids are from white English families and I suspect they are not devout (I'm trying to remember a quote from Pratchett and Gaiman's "Good Omens" - when they avoid going to church, CofE is the church to which they steadfastly avoid going). But regardless, they felt it important enough to enter on their childrens' enrolment records. I do know that one family is serious enough that their child is not allowed to be read anything involving witches, ghosts or anything "dark".

I have no idea how many of the class parents hold homophobic views... and just about everyone seems to be wary of, if not actively antipathetic towards, pagans. Legally, they're not allowed to mind that someone of an alternative religion or sexuality is teaching their children. Morally, they're allowed to think what they want as long as they keep it to themselves. But it's very, very murky ground. It only takes one parent making a fuss, and there are so many things that parents can fuss about when it comes to teachers. A parent objecting to my faith or sexuality would never have to mention either in order to make my job a living hell.

So I keep silent, and it feels dishonest. But what price honesty?

And yet, every day in class, when the children aren't around to listen, I talk cheerfully to my headscarfed, Muslim teaching assistant about my lesbian relationship. She knows all about E and has shown not one iota of disapproval or concern. What she thinks privately I have no idea, but she is comfortable with the idea enough to ask how E is and discuss my weekends with her and ask about her son. I was wary the first time I mentioned E to her, not knowing what the reaction might be, but feeling that as I work so closely with her it would be a strain to hold back. I'm glad I did tell her, as it's been a very healthy demonstration of the fact that mere faith does not define most people.

So I hide my true self from the parents of the kids in my class. They could all be like my TA - cool with it regardless of their own beliefs. But it only takes one who isn't.

I would never hesitate to wear a cross. I would never hesitate to mention a male partner.

Equality in the law is nearly there. Equality in the community is patchy. I just want to be my whole self.

Feasts, Friends and a New Year...

Last weekend I took my first step into autocrating SCA events, running a Winter Feast at the marvellously-named Place House Hall in Ware, Hertfordshire. It's a medieval hall, small but picturesque inside, and it makes a lovely venue. My best mate A was my feast cook and mentored me through the autocrating process admirably. We had a couple of food stuff-ups along the way, but between the two of us we put an elegant and extensive repast on the table in a fantastic location. I also introduced my Thamesreach Singers group with great pride - we sang six period pieces very competently, to the general approval of the attending populace. It was a great night, and a successful start to event-running for me. Yay :)

Term has been underway for a little over two weeks now. I'm so glad to have my own class again, and I've had compliments from every quarter about how quiet and settled they are under my guidance. I feel competent and confident, quite unlike a lot of my earlier teaching experiences! My class are lovely, and I can have a giggle with them and still get them to work, which is great. I am really enjoying myself, and never go to work feeling any apprehension. What a lovely change from so many past workplaces.

These past few weeks I've been struck with joy and gratitude for the friendships I have. E, of course, first and foremost, who is best friend and lover and everything in between. I had never, ever imagined that a relationship could feel like this! Every day I relish it a little bit more for its marvellous perfection, and each day I'm a little more convinced that trying to be in relationships with men was a big part of what I was getting wrong all these years. Being with E just works.

As well as E, I'm lucky enough to be surrounded by a group of people who know the real me, nothing hidden and nothing to hide. And they love me, and care for me, and look out for me, and appreciate me. And beyond them, a wider group of people who perhaps don't know me as well, but nonetheless care for me greatly and will always be there for me. I had the strange experience before Christmas of walking into a pub where a corner was filled with these people, and seeing every face in the group of about 15 light up as I walked in, just because I was there. How bizarre and heady for someone whose deepest demon is invisibility!  I feel so secure in myself these days, and it shows in the quality of my friendships.

These wonderful relationships stand in stark contrast to the negatives, backhanded positives and subtle undermining I was used to from various family members and a few extinct friendships. Every now and then something of that behaviour will intrude from people from my past, and it's amazing how poisonous it feels when once it was normal. I am finding myself better able to ignore it now ... a few peoples' email addresses have been blocked so that I need only read their communications if I feel like it! And I have learned not to react, and only to respond if absolutely necessary. Poison and misery are not things I choose to engage with these days.

So generally... I'm busy, and happy, and loving my life more with every week that passes. It feels good!