How Non-monogamy Taught Me to Stay by My Own Side

From a conversation on the podcast, Nope! We’re Not Monogamous with relationship coach Ellecia Paine:

Emily: There was something beautiful about going through the most romantically chaotic time period of my whole life: it proved to me, oh, we can figure out how to still be here for each other, even as all this was going on.

That was not just about me and my partnerships; that was about me internally.

I can figure out how to be here for myself, even as all this is going on, and care for myself even when my partners are in distress and I feel like I’m supposed to fix that and I don’t know what to do.

Ellecia: That’s a big one. There can be this overwhelming sense of terror and impending doom, where you can’t see to the other side where you’ll actually be fine. You’re not going to die. Whatever happens, it’s helpful to be able to hold yourself through that and know you’re going to be fine.

Emily: These are just emotions. It may feel like I’m going to die, but I know now that I won’t. Fear and anger and sadness can’t actually kill you—which is kind of amazing.

Ellecia: But all the stories tell us they will.

Emily: They do. It’s funny; that’s why I started writing this book. It wasn’t initially a book that I intended for other people. It was that I was in the throes of it and I couldn’t see a way out.

I was trying to borrow from some future self this sense that the story was going to get through this, that the story was going to be different at some point.

I wrote to see the path.

Ellecia: That’s a cathartic way to do that.

Emily: Oh yeah—anyone who’s writing memoir, we’re all just doing self-therapy. It’s no more than that. It’s self-therapy that we then decide to very publicly share.

Ellecia: ‘Here you go! Hope it helps!’

Emily: Yeah. I think too, I knew how valuable this story was to me and I wanted to amplify the effect of that—hoping that it could be as valuable to other people as it had been to me.

I went through some dark nights before publishing where I was like, ‘Nobody has had a story as weird as this. Nobody has made mistakes like this. Everyone is going to laugh at me.’

But I pushed through that in faith that somebody out there is as confused as I was, and I’m just trying to use the book to find them.

Since the book has been out, it’s been really gratifying to hear from people who’ve told me that it’s helped—but people that I love who I went through this story and didn’t tell them all the details all the time, relatives, people I didn’t think I was going to have an impact on are now coming forward and being vulnerable with me in ways that we haven’t been with each other before, and that’s been really beautiful.

Listen to the full conversation at Ellecia Paine’s website, or on Apple Podcasts.