Where Have I Been?

What we're gonna do right here is go back. Way back. Back into time...

The year was 2022. I was finally living the life I believed I was always meant to live. I was young(ish), fine (as hell), making six figures, living in a luxury apartment near downtown Dallas, my friendship business and my man business were both flourishing—your girl was doing her thing.

Then my company hired a new director to oversee my team.

Actually, before I get into that, let me talk about how my job was set up when I was first hired. I was the last hire among a cohort of maybe six new Cybersecurity Consultant hires. Now, I'll admit that I had no idea what all being a consultant entailed when I first started the job. I thought consultants were simply outsourced to other companies to help better their business in whatever way was needed at the time. And technically, that idea wasn't wrong.

What I was unaware of was how, unlike almost every other job in the world, you're not assigned tasks by your manager. You have to actively look for projects, and then you're punished if you don't find enough work. Now, this asinine expectation wouldn't have been that big of a deal if:

1) I received any type of relevant training,

2) I was aware that this expectation of me existed,

3) There was a database of projects available for us to scout,

4) There were enough projects to go around, and

5) My team team had a manager.

Yes, when the six of us were hired, we had no manager. We literally had no idea what we were expected to do. My older, more experienced colleagues were stressed out about this, but I was having the time of my life. I thought we were getting paid to do nothing. I had no idea why the rest of my team was unhappy about that. It turns out, as the only first-time consultant on the team, I was the only fool who was unfamiliar with the whole concept of billable and utilization hours. Unbeknownst to me, despite everything being stacked against us, we were still being held to an unstated standard.

Luckily for me, I was assigned an amazing mentor upon hire. He was so passionate about the work and equally as passionate about teaching me as much as he could. Again, he didn't know I was a first-time consultant, and I didn't know that was important information to divulge. That said, our talks were never about the administrative side of the job, but more so, how to be the most helpful for our clients.

And helpful I was. I made friends with a few other colleagues who took me under their wings and included me in their projects. It didn't take long before I was killing it. My colleagues loved me, and my clients loved me even more.

Then my company hired a new director to oversee my team. Now I can finally speak in detail about this and how it was the genesis of the most tumultuous two years of my life.

This man, at first, seemed to be a good fit; my work style matched his managerial style. Then again, if you've read any of my other blog posts, you'd know that I've never been a good judge of character when it comes to men (more on that in future posts). Anyway, he was chill, we'd meet once or twice a week to discuss what I was working on, and then we'd both go about our days.

That was until he suddenly stopped being chill. I'm pretty sure profits were low and he was being pressured by the powers that be, but I don't care. I still blame him for everything that happened to me from that point forward. Out of nowhere, he began accusing me of not working hard enough. That accusation was baffling because I was clocking in at least 50-60 hours a week and received rave reviews from everybody I worked with. How could he not only tell me I'm not working hard enough, but be inconspicuous and unclear about what he meant by that?

In the span of maybe a month, I went from feeling as though I was working my dream job to being riddled with anxiety over the security of said job. I was miserable. At least three times a week, my director would set up meetings with me just to berate me and tell me that I wasn't good enough.

During one of these meetings, I snapped and told him that maybe I needed to be with another manager because I didn't understand what he wanted from me. When the call ended, I immediately went to the lovely man who hired me to ask for his advice. After hearing my side of the story, he quickly apologized on behalf of the company for me being in the dark about my expectations. He admitted that everyone dropped the ball and from there took his time to clearly explain what the company needed from me.

Still worried about the security of my job after this helpful conversation, I decided to write my boss an email explaining the misunderstanding, taking full accountability, and assuring him that I intend to meet my expectations now that I'm clear on what they are.

He didn't respond. For two weeks following the delivery of that email, I basically begged my colleagues to include me on their projects. Most of them kindly declined because they were also running low on their billable hours and couldn't afford to give any away. At the end of those two weeks, I had received a written warning for not being able to predict and write down my workload for the subsequent work weeks because I didn't have any work to do during those weeks, of which my director was aware.

Two weeks after receiving the written warning (which I refused to sign), I was fired and offered $1,200 in severance. My rent alone was $1,800.

I’m going to end this traumatic, yet juicy, story here. I don't know when I'll have the energy to write part two, but please continue to stick around!

Cheating with Permission

Okay, so unlike my last post, this title is click-bait and you weaklings fell for it.

Today we're actually talking about ethical non-monogamy (ENM). I’m just going to assume that most of you have limited knowledge on what ENM is. I will even go ahead and suggest that 99% of those of you reading this post had never heard the term before today. Well, thank God for me, because I’m here to make you all smarter. You’re welcome.

This post is going to be different from all of my other posts, because a majority of it is going to be plagiarized. Why should I bother doing the work, when someone else has already taken the time to do it? I will first, however, provide you with my personal definition of what ENM is before I essentially copy and paste a really informative article I found on Google.

ENM, to me and as the name may strongly suggest, is the practice of engaging in romantic relationships with multiple people who are all aware of and have formally given their consent to participate. This is what separates ENM from cheating—it’s consensual rather than a stab in the back. Ariane Resnick, CNC states that, “ENM can present in a relationship in many different ways. It may involve one person acting outside of the relationship or both parties doing that. It may involve only sexual connections with others, only romantic connections, or both romantic and sexual connections.” Ultimately, ENM can look like whatever the parties involved want it to look like—there’s no one way to practice the lifestyle.

There are multiple types of ENM, but again, it is an umbrella term that is not limited to the following options (note - here’s where I start plagiarizing for real, for real):

Polyamory - probably the most well-known version of ENM and the lifestyle I happen to currently be exploring. Polyamory is the practice of having or being open to multiple romantic relationships with the knowledge and consent of everyone involved. Polyamory is founded on the belief that love is not finite and that connecting deeply with others should not be restricted to a single partner with whom we can explore emotionally and physically intimate relationships. Polyamorous relationships rely on communication between parties about matters from safe sex to emotions. Polyamory may involve a long-term commitment to more than one person simultaneously. The word polycule is often used to describe a connected polyamorous network.

Open Relationships - unlike polyamory, open relationships do not generally involve a commitment to parties outside of a two-person relationship. This relationship model is most known for partners being able to pursue outside sexual connections, but it may involve romantic and/or emotional connections with others as well. However, these are usually conducted under the premise that the primary, two-person relationship is the most prioritized.

Relationship Anarchy - a model wherein the people involved don't use hierarchical terms for partners or think of them in terms of priority. It contrasts with relationship hierarchy, in which there is a primary relationship that gets most of a person's attention. In relationship anarchy, everyone is equal. An individual won't necessarily view a romantic relationship as more important than a friendship, and they may not even categorize their relationships as strictly platonic, romantic, and/or sexual. This model is centered around personal freedom and autonomy.

Monogamish - the term for couples who are mostly monogamous but occasionally take part in outside sexual relationships. People who are monogamish tend to focus on outside sexual encounters only, not romantic connections with others besides their partner. They also may go long periods of time in between outside sexual encounters.

Polygamy - when one person has multiple spouses. This can be one husband having multiple wives or one wife with multiple husbands, but it is best known as the former.

Like I said earlier, I am currently exploring polyamory. Well, it turns out that there are also multiple types of polyamory. The nine common types of polyamory are triad, quad, vee, solo polyamory, polycule, hierarchical poly, anchor partners, kitchen-table poly, and parallel poly. This post is already long as hell, so you can find the definitions of the various types of polyamory here. At this point in time, I'm more attracted to hierarchal poly. I’m looking for a primary partner with whom I’ll cohabitate, combine finances, and have children, but I’m completely open to us exploring secondary romantic connections if that’s where life takes us. Until I find that primary partner, I’ll be practicing solo polyamory, meaning I’ll have multiple partnerships that are not defined in a hierarchical manner.

And you know what? Let me make this clear for those of you who assume that polyamory is all about sex. Can it be all about sex? Yes, if that's how the participant wants it to be. Is it, by definition, all about sex? Absolutely not, and that's the type of polyamory I'm choosing to practice. If you know anything about me, you know how much I value interpersonal relationships. Long-story short, I don't want to limit how I can give and receive love if I don't have to. If sex with multiple people is your thing, more power to you; just be safe. As for me and my household...

I was so excited when I realized and accepted that I don’t have to force myself into a box. There are a multitude of ways you can choose to live your romantic life outside of monogamy or monogamy with a side of cheating. Polyamory makes sense for me and the stage of life I find myself in. If monogamy makes sense for you, that's great! But if this post piqued your interest, even just little bit, start looking within yourself to figure out what you want your life to look like. At the end of the day, it is your life, and a very short one at that. Do whatever makes you content, baby.

Am I Polyamorous?

The title isn’t clickbait, y’all. It’s something that I’ve been thinking about for a while; hear me out!

If you know me, you’ll know that I’ve pretty much always been an open minded person. I’m shady by nature, so I will honestly side-eye some people’s life choices, but as a whole, I genuinely don’t care about much. A phrase that I often say is, “it’s not that deep,” because truly, nothing is ever that deep. Think about the one situation that bothered you the most 5 years ago…how much do you care about it now? Probably not much (and if it’s still something that greatly bothers you, no offense, but you may want to seek a therapist). All in all, the point I’m trying to make is that most of the things that get us riled up at any given moment, don’t really matter at all in the grand scheme of life.

Speaking of life, in the current stage of life I find myself in, my priority is not only happiness—because happiness is fickle, right?—but contentment. According to whoever writes Wikipedia articles, “Contentment is an emotional state of satisfaction that can be seen as a mental state drawn from being at ease in one's situation, body and mind. Colloquially speaking, contentment could be a state of having accepted one's situation and is a milder and more tentative form of happiness.” There is not a single thing in life right now that is more important to me than my journey towards contentment. Why? Because life is too f*****g short. I don’t want to waste my precious time on earth worrying, being angry, being upset, or being anything other than content.

With that being said, let me get into the real reason y’all clicked on this post. As I approached the fine age of 30, of course the realization that I’m not even CLOSE to getting married and having children, hit me semi-hard (because again, I don’t care about anything that much). For me, it was more about knowing that it was something that was expected of me, and I was, in so many words, failing terribly at meeting that expectation.

When I reached age 28, maybe 29, I became serious about finding “the one." One by one, my friends were getting engaged, married, having children, and wow, the pressha was getting wessa. From previous posts, y’all know I keep a long list of what I want in a man. Don’t get me wrong, that list is still very much so important to me, but at that point, I wasn't even giving a man a chance if he didn't meet a good percentage of the attributes on that list. So it became this thing where I was rejecting very nice and serious men because they weren’t what I considered husband material. I had a goal that I was determined to accomplish, but the journey towards that goal was lonely as hell.

Then one day, it hit me. Every man that I was turning down had one major quality I loved; they just didn’t have the whole package. I thought to myself, I said, “Self, why shouldn’t I simultaneously enjoy each man for the one great quality he possesses until I find the one man who has every quality I’m looking for?” The math finally started mathing, and I immediately began reaching out to my friends and family to discuss this revelation. Below is an excerpt from one of those conversations:

My past monogamous situations didn’t end because me and the guys had issues. In fact, things suddenly ended when we were at our happiest, when things were going great between us. Why? Because they were harboring pain and/or lingering feelings for women from their past and decided it was better to leave me and pursue those women instead.

And you know, the pain I felt from those situations weren’t due to their love for another woman, it was a result of me not understanding why they had to leave me because they loved another woman. What did their feelings for someone else have to do with me? Like, you and I are good; why are you ruining what we have? I genuinely couldn’t comprehend why I had to suffer because of feelings that existed outside of me.

So, I’ve been exploring polyamory (we’ll get into the different types of ethical non-monogamy in my next post). I wanted to explore this lifestyle because of the three things I value more than anything in a relationship—openness, honesty, and transparency.

I wanted to try polyamory because it’s my assumption that men in this lifestyle are accustomed to being vulnerable. I’ve never had an issue with my men wanting to be with other women; my issue was them feeling like it was more appropriate to lie about their desires than to keep it real with me. I feel safe with 100% truthfulness, even when the truth hurts.

Men who are, for the lack of a better word, conditioned to only practice monogamy despite their true desires, have made a habit of lying in order to keep the peace within their relationships. I, personally, am no longer interested in that type of relationship. The idea is to be married for the rest of my life. Call me cynical, but I refuse to fool myself into thinking that within 50+ years of marriage, my partner and I won’t, at the very least, face temptation. Am I to pretend it’s not happening, or should I accept the fact, and promote open discussions and transparency within my relationship? I don’t know about y’all, but I choose the latter.

Now, me being the impulsive person I am, I’ve already started dating within the polyamorous space and I LOVE it. I’ve never be happier. I’m sure y'all are dying for the tea, of which there is a lot to spill, but you’ll just have to wait for my next series of posts!!

I’ll end this post with a question I’ve been asking a lot of people lately: if we were exposed to different lifestyles from childhood, would we all have chosen monogamy? DM me your response.