Leap Anyway, part 1

Starting Over - Friends

My parents moved our family to Colorado as I was starting second grade. I befriended a classmate that was a fellow Jehovah’s Witness. We did everything together. The two of us explored the wilderness behind our elementary school, and paid obeisance to the Great Bear Spirit which protected us from thunderstorms and directed us to build dams out of sticks and rocks. We were separated in third grade, as my parents moved me to a different school district. I didn’t see much of him after that.

This happened multiple times with many friendships across my childhood. But people are mostly good. As long as I could be friendly I could find someone to befriend. And I always did.

By late high school I was on at least the sixth cycle of friend loss/friend pursuit, but I had one best friend who I’d hung onto for years. In fact I’d fallen in love with this best friend. We read the same books, living the same shared experiences through them. We played endless video games together, mostly co-op, overcoming adversity and increasingly frustrating challenges together—back when you had to be in the same room to do that. My first date was a double-date with him and two similarly-close girls.

He was a year older than me, and I still had one year left in high school when his parents moved the family to Texas. He was going with them. I wanted him to stay with me, but what could I say? I had nothing to offer him. I couldn’t support him. I couldn’t ask my parents to take him in. I couldn’t offer him romantic affection or sex, since we were both straight. There was no reason for him to stay. I had nothing at all.

It’s OK though. I can make new friends. As long as you can be friendly and interesting you can make new friends.

Starting Over - Lovers

My first wife was incredibly family-focused. We spent most of our free hours with her family. It was a huge multi-generational hispanic family, who spent the majority of their non-working hours in the large home kept by her parents for this purpose. Their door was always open, and it was rare to find the house without an aunt or cousin or son-in-law visiting. Her mother always had food on. Her father had permanent laugh-lines around his eyes, he loved being surrounded by his loved ones. When everyone came over for Christmas they began opening presents at 6pm and didn’t stop until after midnight. Multiple giant trash bags of wrapping paper had to be hauled out throughout the night. It was my first experience of a truly happy home. It’s what every group house aspires to be.

I loved my in-laws, but my wife and I were a terrible match. When we divorced I lost all of them. We had put so many hours of life into these relationships, and suddenly they were just gone.

It’s OK though. I can make new bonds. I was twenty-six, I have so much more in me.

My second wife renovated a house with me. We spent months tearing out everything, treating it for smoke (the walls in the bathroom literally wept yellow-brown nicotine tears whenever we showered), and restoring it. When we divorced she got half the house, which was fair. She also took nearly half of the other property I owned, the one I’d bought without her, which she had refused to help with. Once I asked her to bring a replacement key to a tenant that had locked himself out while I was at work. She offered to do it for a delivery fee. She got half of that house anyway, because that is how marriage law works.

It’s OK, I can rebuild. I was thirty-six, I have tons of energy and time, I have a job, and I still have significant earnings left over even after the divorce. It wasn’t a full reset from zero.

In my third cohabitation relationship (I was smart enough to not get married again) all the work I did for my partner was explicitly for her. When we renovated her house, that was her house, which I worked on because I love her and I would get to live there too. When I built a guest bedroom, it was her guest bedroom, which I built to gift to her. When I did accounting or ops work for her it was because it made me happy to see her de-stressed. When we separated I didn’t lose anything. I had kept the things I made for me, I never claimed anything I did for her, and she kept the things that were hers.

Standing Up Under Your Own Power

The thing I learned in childhood, and was proven true over and over in life, is that I must always be able to stand up on my own. Other people will inevitably be torn away, everything dies, and I’ll be left drowning if I’m not already secure solo.

This is a core reality of masculinity. I do not want this to be true. It is scary and it is lonely. None of those things matter. It is my job to carve out a safe place in the world for me to stand on. It is the job of every man to do this. Physical reality is impartial and relentless, and to make a piece of it hospitable is necessary and supremely important work. That it has to be done, and it is hard, is why it’s a virtue. There is no one else to do it. Yes, it sucks. This is one of the ways life sucks. There are many.

Over the years I got better at holding onto ever more parts of myself between resets. I laid a solid foundation for perpetual existence in Denver. I had accumulated a few townhomes over a decade and a half, which I now maintained, managed, and rented out. It didn’t pay much, but it was just enough to live on in Denver if I lived cheap, and left me with lots of spare time to pursue unpaid work. I wrote a lot of fiction and podcasted. I helped start & run the rationalist community in Denver. I had long tenure and some responsibilities in a decades-old SFF reading group, and a professional fiction writers critique circle. I developed a base in the Denver goth community. I had a few friendships going back decades.

I had carved out a safe place in the world that I could stand on for, probably, the rest of my life. I did the thing.

But it’s lonely out there on your little shelf of stable rock. Now that I had it, what could I do with it? I kept trying to get others to share it with me, expand on it together, maybe merge our shelves. I wanted to live in a large house with many people. I wanted to no longer be alone, and it kept not working. It was good that I was so skilled at starting over, because I kept failing whenever I tried to merge.

What I really wanted was for someone with a pre-existing protected barrier to invite me into it.

---

Part Two here - a leap of faith, and its consequences