Hitting The Poly Wall

“Love is infinite,” the poly saying goes.  “Time is scarce.”
The thing is, if you’re willing to communicate with me via my preferred channels, we can talk a lot.  I loathe the phone, but I’ll cheerfully text you two or three times a day.  I’ll write emails and send goofy pictures and say howdy.
And up until now, that’s been a filtering system.  There’s been only so many people who really want to deal with someone who largely exists online with snippets of real-life visits, so… I’ve managed.
It’s starting to fray, though.
Part of that’s my upping of convention appearances.  People are asking to have me talk on polyamory at conventions, and I’m happy to go as long as I don’t lose money on the event, so I’ve been doing that and book conventions.  That eats up a weekend or two a month.
But I’m also dating more women now, and they strangely enough want actual time with me, and that’s consuming a weekend or two a month.
And I have friends! Actual friends who want to visit from out of town, or those crazy in-town people who want to say hello, and they want weekends!  And that’s consuming a weekend or two a month.
And I didn’t realize how bad things had gotten until I tried to book a weekend with my girlfriend and realized every weekend between now and January was booked.  Taken.  Not a one for myself.
For an introvert, that’s a solid way to guarantee a meltdown.  (Fortunately, I also have like nine days’ vacation left this year so I can shim in some free time among the edges.)
And the thing is, I don’t regret any of the weekends I took! I had friends visiting, and that was great! I had a good time at conventions, and that was great!  I got to smooch people I’m attracted to, and that was great!  And the problem is that my life is so overflowing with greatness now that I’m going to have to figure out what to leave on the sidelines, and it’s killing me.
So I have to figure out how to work all of this in.  Some ugly choices are going to have to be made, for I’m going to need weekends alone to play Fallout 4 and recharge and, you know, not die.  And there are going to be people who I very much want to meet up with who I literally don’t have time to see, which is a sad thing because I love them very much but Jesus, I have only 365 days and I am dying here.
I think I have to choose my convention appearance spots, and schedule far in advance, and spend a lot of time wishing I had eight weeks’ of vacation time so I could show up everywhere.  But I don’t, and so this is going to get frustrating.
This is what’s known in the business as “polysaturated.”  And I dislike using the term for me, as this indicates the only reason I’m not seeing someone new is because I’m fucking everyone I know.  But “polyamory” for me covers a wide spectrum of affections, where I have deep platonic friendships I have to maintain as well, and family connections that matter, and all of that adds up to “saturated” – and poly has only a tiny amount to do with that.
I should add that I’m not looking for fixes, though. Sometimes, like my depression-blogging, I chronicle things so people will know, “Oh, that’s A Thing that happens in people’s lives,” and then people clog in with all sorts of suggestions and fights break out in the comments because people know how to solve it.  I’m not asking to solve it; there’s not a solution that will make me happy, aside from people I like magically paying them to hang with them (and even if I could crowdsource an experience like that, I’d feel scummy about doing so).  I’m just saying that when some people say “I am polysaturated,” this is the wall they are hitting.
Now you know!  And now I have to figure out how not to melt down in 2016, especially when I’m hoping to do another book tour for FIX.
(NOTE: THE FLUX is dropping on October 6th.  There will be no book tour, alas, but feel free to buy that shiz anyway.)