Since my confession earlier, I've gotten a few questions on how exactly I maintain the relationships I do and how on Earth do they work. I'm going to attempt to answer the questions but this is all pertaining to MY relationships. Other people's relationships are going to be different. There's two big reasons for this. First, they're different people so the way they communicate and handle everything regarding a relationship is going to be different from mine. Second, I have a lot of emotional and psychological ... baggage* that I deal with on a daily basis and it colors pretty much everything to some extent.
Now, the first thing I have to say about my relationships with deities is that they fall on the more human styled side of the ledger. I tend to view deities as persons with discrete personalities (some with different ones for different aspects shown). All of the possible relationships that you can have with someone on the mundane day to day level are possible with deities. All of the stuff that arises from personalities interacting, communication issues, and people being people is going to be present in these relationships. I've yet to find an experience with any deity that doesn't fit this mold. (I'm sure now that I have said this, there will be something that comes along and blows this statement out of the water. Because stuff like that happens.)
With Freyr, I did my level best to avoid godspousery. I kept going 'no, we're just friends' but, that didn't stay that way. He romanced his way into my heart. I was courted. There really isn't a better word for it. He made little things land in my path that were tokens of affection, help when I didn't anticipate it, and encouragement when I was feeling low. He did more than just be a supportive friend. He spoke to me in the sweetest of ways (and this can be taken in multiple fashions, so I'll leave that up to you) and he was persistent. In many ways, Freyr's pursuit of me was like Beloved's. He out-stubborned me and found his way past my barriers to pick up the fragile parts of me and love them. This has been a theme between him and I ever since. (Did I mention that Freyr is very patient when he chooses to be and he will use strategy to outmaneuver you when he deems it necessary?)
Every once in a while, I get anxious and I start to try to shut down things. He breaks through my mental walls like they were just dry-wall in his way. Sure, it creates a minor hindrance but if you're determined to get through it, it will break. And when you have some force to put behind your effort, it will give very quickly. Using the dry-wall analogy, let me go a bit farther here. I get anxious and throw up my dry-wall bulwarks. He decides that this is not going to happen and will either take the sheets off of where I put them or kick them out to get to me. The former happens when he is feeling patient. The latter happens when there is a sense of urgency. Does this mean I don't have boundaries with him? No. But when I start trying to cut myself off emotionally from the world around me, he breaks through my mental walls and then guides me out.
(Loki will just break through those walls like he's the Kool-Aid man and then grab a hold of me and drag me out. More about Loki in a minute, though.)
Freyr will just hang out with me when I'm doing stuff around the house. When I say that I see him or feel him with me, it is psychic impressions. Though there have been times where I felt physical contact with out a physical person being there. (Getting kissed that way is very confusing.) A lot of the stuff we do happens on that psychic level. I know that the naysayers would declare that this is my over active imagination or hallucinations happening. To them, I have two things to say. One, my imagination produces horrors 9 times out of 10, happy things doesn't pop up except in rare cases. Two, I've experienced hallucinations. I am intimately familiar with my hallucinations and I have has psychic stuff still happen despite the fact that I was on very powerful anti-hallucinogenic medications. Y'all's doubt really can't hold a candle to this one, sorry.
When I'm out walking, I feel him with me. I feel him holding my hand at times. We will talk or we'll be quiet. When we talk, it is through psychic stuff most of the time because I don't want the normals to look at me like I'm insane. Yes, he can hear my thoughts. And yes, that does get me into trouble at times. When he catches me in my negative thought cycle, he'll call me on my bullshit and he'll force me to take a step back and look at things from a more realistic lens. And, yes, we have argued. The reason why we have argued is most often I am doing something that is unhealthy for me and insisting that I need to do it. I don't win those arguments. But, arguments don't happen that often. Freyr is more one to cut me off at the pass before I can get my heels dug in and gently but firmly push me in the right direction for my welfare.
Great example of this would be a few days ago when I decided that I wasn't going to eat lunch. I have problems with food, namely when I get super stressed out, I start to starve myself because I feel like that is the only thing I can control in my life. I was set to not eat lunch and derp around on the computer when Freyr said 'Go eat.' I said I was going to do it later. He retorted I should do it now. At which point both the computers I was working on crashed, the pen I was writing with stopped working, and the book I was writing in fell off the desk and landed on the floor in such a manner that I couldn't find my page. I thought about persisting in my refusal when I got a stern look from him and the pantry cupboard with the cans of soup in it opened by itself. To say the least, I stopped being stubborn and ate some soup. That is usually how disagreements between him and I go. I'm deciding not to do something good for me and he takes away all of my distractions and then drops exactly what I was trying to avoid right into my proverbial lap.
And then there is Loki. Because it is Loki, it is a complicated and kinda confusing mess for me. It was literally decades of my being infatuated and him telling me, "I'm not into you that way." In the midst of all this, we built up a solid, but weird, friendship. I was at the type of friendship where you casually insult your friend as a joke and the return with an even more vulgar one as a joke. Some people would have been horrified by this. But, it worked for Loki and I.
Then in late August, things changed. I am still getting used to this change. I had finally managed to get myself to the point where I wasn't mooning over him. I had the moments of 'Damn, he is attractive!' but I had gotten to the point where I wasn't utterly distracted by them. They just became part of the background noise of things between him and I. And then the way he looked at me changed. It wasn't a soft, sweet romantic thing. He didn't start doing the roses, champagne, and chocolates kinda thing.
No, Loki went from being the gleeful asshat who trolled me on a regular basis, gave weird but super effective solutions to problems, and dropped the worst puns at the worst times to being the exact type of sadist I have always fantasized over. (Yes, there is S/m involved and other kink stuff too. No, I'm not giving all the details. If you know where to look, you'll find the stuff he had me write about it. No, I'm not giving links here.) I was convinced that it was my projecting my desires on to him. I was convinced that I was reading into things. I basically was running in mental circles screaming 'THIS IS NOT HAPPENING!' because I didn't want to be the 'special snowflake' or lumped in with the fangirls.
Loki laughed at that. That really was my first warning that this was legit. And then he started manipulating things around me. I went from not remembering my dreams (which had been going on for a while due to my PTSD issues) to suddenly remembering them with such clarity that I could almost feel them happening when I thought about it. The dreams were not all happy romance. No, they were a mixture of him hitting my kink buttons with disturbing accuracy, him challenging me with respect to my poor self care skills, and something that I couldn't define at first. It took me several months to realize that he was doing more than just using the fact that he knew where all the proverbial bodies were buried to get me to look in the mirror of myself or that he knew all the mental buttons to push to get a response out of me. I realized that he was feeding some deep seated pyschological needs that I had been denying for years.
And, honestly, that scared the shit out of me. Having decades of denial that there was a need being thrown back in my face was terrifying. Having the bad coping methods I had used in the past stop working over night (literally) was equally terrifying. At the same time, even as he was scaring me near witless, he was handling me with care. He was loving in a manner that I didn't think was possible. And, because I have issues with stuff like that, I was scared. When I start to erect my mental walls, Freyr may dismantle them or kick them in. Loki, however, is the one who will burn them down around me even as he breaks through them. So, I don't have the moment of "I can hide here. Wait, how did you get here?" that I get with Freyr. No, I have the realization that I am trapped before Loki grabs a hold of me and drags me out.
I know that Loki's doing that on purpose. Freyr is doing his best to get me to see the reason and logic behind the argument that I am putting myself into a box and restricting myself needlessly. Loki, well, Loki is showing me just how bad of an idea that is even as he is ripping me out of it. And Loki doesn't just do stuff like rip me out of my mental hiding places and force me to look at myself. He's done it and all but thrown me at Freyr because I had started avoiding Freyr because of my anxiety issues. (It's happened several times, I regret to report.)
Loki is also making a point of showing Freyr where the proverbial bodies are and what buttons to push. This has made things... disconcerting. Freyr has started pushing mental buttons in his own way and it has been both delightful and disturbing at the same time. And Loki finds this amusing. So he encourages more of it to happen. Because the thinking between them, if I understand it rightly, is that they can always use pleasure as both a reward and a goad to get me moving in the right direction. All at the same time as they are teaching me that there's nothing wrong with enjoying myself. (I have massive, massive problems with this and letting myself be happy.)
That's basically what's going on right now between them and I. I'll post something more about the devotional stuff I do later this weekend.
~*~*~*~*~*~
* I have complex post-traumatic stress disorder in spades from the many different traumas I experienced in my life. I also have bipolar and some major self-esteem problems. It effects pretty much all parts of my life. I'd give examples but they're not pretty and, honestly, it requires a level of openness that I'm not ready to show right now. Just take my word on it, the stuff that has me disabled is horrific and I've been told by professionals that my mental health problems are functionally equivalent to someone who has been in a war zone.
No comments:
Post a Comment