Nobody Ever Told Me I Couldn’t Go

It started in my stomach.

Before a thought, before a word, before I had worked out what I was going to do. Someone would invite me somewhere and there would be half a second of ordinary happiness, and then something underneath it would drop. A sinking. A tightening just below my ribs. The excitement never survived the trip from my chest to my stomach.

I did not know what that was. I thought I was anxious. I thought maybe I had become one of those people who does not like plans.

What was actually happening is that my body had already run the numbers, and I had not caught up yet.

The Christmas party

I work remote. Once a year the company flies everyone in and we finally sit in the same room, all the people I talk to every day and have never stood next to.

I read the email twice. I was happy.

And then, immediately, underneath it: how am I going to tell him.

Not whether I would go. How I would bring it up. What kind of mood he would need to be in. Whether to mention it that night or wait until the weekend. Whether to lead with the fact that it was for work, or lead with how much I did not want to go, so that going would look like an obligation instead of something I wanted.

So I “asked” him.

I want you to notice that I put that word in quotation marks. I did it without thinking. I did it just now, writing this, years later. Because saying I asked permission to attend my own work party sounds dramatic, and I have spent a very long time not being dramatic. So I put the little marks around it to soften it, the way I softened everything.

Here is the part that took me the longest to understand.

It was an employee-only event. Because of the cost, no partners, no spouses, no guests. He could not have come. There was no decision to make. Nothing was being taken from him and nothing was being asked of him. There was no conflict available.

And I still felt it in my stomach. I still spent two days working out how to say it.

Nothing had to happen for it to happen.

The Super Bowl party

My best friend reached out. We had lost touch somewhere in the middle of the relationship, and I could not have told you when, or how, or what the last conversation was about.

She invited us both. Not me. Us. By name.

There was nothing to object to. He was included. It was a Sunday. It was football.

We did not go.

I do not remember the reason. I remember there was one, and that it was reasonable, and that I agreed with it.

My sister’s retirement

She lives in another state. She wanted me there.

I knew he would not go. So I did not ask.

I did not go.

What I could not explain

Somewhere in there I stopped bringing things up.

Not because I was told not to. Because I had gotten good at predicting the answer, and predicting it saved everyone the trouble. It felt efficient. It felt like knowing my partner well. It felt, and I mean this, like being considerate.

When I think about my sister’s retirement now, the part that stops me is not that I missed it. It is that there was no argument. Nothing was said. Nothing happened that I could point to afterward and hold up as evidence. I made the decision myself, quickly and quietly, and then I told her I could not make it, and I believed the reason I gave her.

Going alone was not an option.

I have read that sentence back a hundred times. Nobody said it to me. Nobody forbade anything. There was no rule, no ultimatum, no moment where anything was announced.

It was simply true. It had become true the way weather becomes true.

That is the thing I had no language for. I kept looking for what had been done to me, and I could not find it. There was only a long list of things I did not do, and a sinking feeling that had shown up years before I understood what it was trying to tell me.

My body knew first. It usually does.