CW Racism, Trauma

I'm writing this unsure if I'll actually post it, but I know I need to write it. I want to stress please call me out if I'm misguided in anything because I'm deeply confused about so much right now and I don't know what the right step is. 

Also I'm going to go over this with my therapist. 

I want to start by saying, 

My partner has done so much for me. Been really genuinely good to me. Kind and generous in ways that have honestly helped me to heal and finally step out of my traumatic upbringing and continued stumbling history. They have done so much to help me feel safe in this world. A feeling I thought I could only feel when either completely alone or completely lost in a fantasy reality far removed from the harshly bitter things I've experienced and continue to encounter in this life. I love them immensely. We're engaged even. Been together for almost two years. Or two year anniversary is practically almost here. I do not want to be without them and I try to show it and earn the love they give because they deserve all the happiness this world can offer.  

And yet knowing all of this my impulse is to leave them. Although I'll probably start with trying to set boundaries first.

I have helped them get into therapy and regardless of what happens will keep them on my healthcare in the hopes continued personal work will help them move past or at least learn to cope better with both what they've endured and continue to endure. 

I'm caught in this place of having been the partner who had a lot of baggage and trauma to work through and having failed to adequately contain it up to the point of burning out someone I loved very much. And who ultimately left me. I know what it feels like to be left desperate to save something precious and being completely not up to the task because the work ahead was too great and built up for too long. 

I don't want to do that to them. Especially because I understand at least as much as I possibly can that they have endured a lifetime of hurt that will never end because it is inherently tied to their skin and this fucked up society we are both a part of. They have experienced so much mistrust and indirect violence as a black queer person living in the deep south and I know I'll never be able to understand what that's like. But it keeps coming up when they get unstable that divide gets bigger and bigger. And nothing I can do can sooth that hurt because I'm white and queer. Because every attempt I make at comfort cannot sooth the ills of society. Because I can't fix the world. 

I want so bad to be a sanctuary for them. For our home, our cat, our life to be something they can trust and rely on, but time and time again it's nowhere near enough. I'm not black, I'm white and living in Oregon. There isn't a large population of black folxs. And I'm regularly reminded of how out of place they feel here. How lonely it feels and how I cannot sooth that loneliness. 

Their are layers to their experience I cannot understand. Things I've encountered I cannot explain or comprehend. They moved here on a desperate whim to escape the south. In a particularly unstable evening following a while after our first meeting in person. I tried to stop them repeatedly over weeks, until they gave me no choice. I wanted them to visit first, but it just didn't happen. 

They came here and we have done our best to make it work over a year and sometime more. And I've done my best to support them. Get them healthcare, get the cat from across the country. I've taken trips with them back to visit their family and every time we go back they talk about missing Oregon because people are nicer here, and people their are harsher. But when we're here they miss the blackness of the south. And have so much unvented anger towards different people of different races. 

They have this isolated hurt and anger I can't hold and I can't handle hearing. Because I'm just not built that way. And I don't have those same traumatic experiences of other racial groups and other people's mistreatment of black folxs. 

But their anger and isolation keep bubbling up and it's getting to the point that the bad moments and instability are really starting to overshadow the positive. 

So I'm left asking in the face of all of this, what do I do? Because I can't bear the hatred and evil of an entire world. Something I'd always thought I could do. But I can't. But I really don't want to lose them. Or let them down. 

-Tiny addendum, 

I tried talking with them about it and expressed I needed a boundary around these talks. That I can't handle it because I want to help, but I can't. 

So they asked if they could find a second partner a romantic non-physical squish. In addition to talking to their therapist. All in place of me. They need the romance to have the level of trust to talk about something's. Without it it'd just be a friendship and those are levels of connection they differentiate because they can't talk to their friends as deeply as partners.

They're poly and I'm not. So it seems normal to them, but something about it just makes me feel really uncomfortable and anxious. Like if they find this person they can talk about everything to as opposed to being limited with me, why wouldn't they leave me and just find another second partner who can meet all of the additional needs I do? Without dealing with a non-poly partner? 

If you read this mess this far thank you. I'm sorry it's a lot. I did talk to my therapist about it, which is what prompted me to assert the boundary, but the result of that just didn't go how I'd thought. 

Because to me it feels like they're asking for a lot.