flamingsword | TX politics and Ghost

I still need to talk to Ghost about making our relationship a long distance one if he is not moving with me. Because I have not broached that subject, yet, and I don’t know how to. He feels safe in Texas because he thinks that the politicians of Texas are just greedy, and are using tribalism and othering to control people into voting for them. He doesn’t think that any of them are true believers in the “people I don’t see as human may as well go to work camps and die there” belief set and other forms of christofascism. I … disagree.,

He doesn’t disrespect me for having fears, but he also doesn’t believe me when I say to believe people when they show you who they are. Dan Patrick wants to prosecute people for being trans, and to erase us from public life. Is Abbott the same way? I don’t know, but I do know that he got the trumpster fire involved in our (multiple-securities-fraud-charged) Attorney General Ken Paxton’s trial. He does not reign in his friends, he closes ranks and toes what he sees as the party line. And with his party pushing Project 2025 and it’s criminalization of all trans care, our access to bathrooms, our access to sports, trans kids access to even hearing about us on the internet, and in all ways pushing us as far toward the margins as possible - well, the party line is a garrote around our necks.

I have the option of going to live with my mother in NC for the about ten to twelve months that it will take to get more education and take the necessary tests for living and working in Washington. And yeah, Mom is bad about respecting my pronouns, but at least she’s not a reprehensible person in other, abuse-adjacent, ways. I can manage a year in non-ideal circumstances if I have to, if that’s what it will take to get me to being proximal to my best friends on a longer-term basis.

In other news, if anyone has had the “why don’t we make our relationship into a long distance relationship, a vacationship, or something less defined” conversation, please please please hit me up, I need so much advice right now.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I've had reasonable success with LTR, if you define them as "we get together once or twice a year and fuck and we're allowed to see other people, and when one of us gets monogamous, we stay friends." Not sure if that's what you're after.

Fun fact: It doesn't matter if politicians are genuinely transphobic, etc., or just doing it to get votes, because the harm is the same.

Yeah! Ghost believes that because fascism is expensive to run, that Texas politicians won’t go for it, just flirt with it. But both of those sets of people are still😅 doing a fascism, right now, and it doesn’t matter if they “believe” in fascism, they are still hurting people like me for the sake of the moral attitudes of people who definitely do believe. They will still be fine putting people like me in a camp, for being non-binary / trans, for being disabled, for being “weird” i.e. autistic. They will still be putting razor wire in the Rio Grande and union busting and building fuckin concentration camps. All we’re missing is the showers and the damn ovens. 🤬🤬🤬😭😭😭

Okay, I’m going to try to set aside the giant squid of anger long enough to ask about the LDRs. How did you move from a shorter distance relationship to a longer one? What worked for getting across, “I still want to see you, and will miss you, and still love you” from a distance? If I just say the words, he might think I’m insincere or fooling myself. He has a pretty dim view of humanity, currently.

Pushing past the emotional reactions to this entire topic, I keep coming back to the first time we discussed you marrying Ghost. With you elsewhere, how will this affect the original goal for you two formalizing the relationship? Can you be there for him when you're not around him day to day? I'm asking these as honest questions and with no other dynamic at work. How will his life change if you move, and will this leave him more at risk? You told me you were entering the marriage with a strong caretaker component, has that risk gone away or reduced to the point that the reason for you to be legally bound or share space is no longer a factor? I know things are uncomfortable for you right now, and that's a valid issue. But there are four relationships tied into this particular situation, and exploring what changes will do to all four of them is smart, so nothing jumps out and says "Boo!" when you're not expecting it.

He hasn’t had a full manic episode since we got married, and hasn’t had hypomania in the last ten years. Lots of people with Bipolar Disorder have brain changes in the late thirties and early forties that make their symptom severity worse, but Ghost seems to have gotten better as far as mania goes, possibly because he’s stayed on medication since his early twenties.

If he’s talking to his parents every weekend, and me (or a different person if he doesn’t feel okay talking to me) in the middle of the week, then I think he would be as stable as he is right now. I could call his parents, one of his besties, or his brother to come talk him into going inpatient if need be. I’m a big piece of his support network, but I’m not the only thing standing between him and doom; the way it has sometimes felt. And since his family doesn’t know about the drug use, I have at least one way to blackmail him into getting help if he super needs it.

I get that my relationship to Ghost and his relationship to me are tied up in this, but what other relationships are you thinking this will change things for, if you think there a four of them?

I sort of figured you'd catch that detail. In any given interaction between two people, , say A and B, then the number of relationships is AB^2, or four in this case -- A to B, B to A, A to A, and B to B. Many people don't know about the significance of the self relationship, but things can hit that one as hard or harder as the interpersonal ones (I guess the proper term for that self relationship is an intrapersonal relationship, at least in that conceptual model).

I'm glad things have gotten more stable for him. That's one concern off the table.

TX politics and Ghost

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