Self Aware

I have a million jagillion things I want to blog, but haven’t mustered the energy to get into wordpress. Blogger’s lament, right?

I’ve been adjusting to living by myself, which has it’s ups and downs, but I think I’m finally getting the hang of it. Mostly this means that I have a lot of time to stew in my own brain juices. Or actually – my heart juices. I haven’t been feeling especially inspired toward creating new projects (or completing old ones, ahem), which are now kind of a wish list of side projects and creative bits that I want to make. However, I’ve been very prone to self-reflection and massive overthinking, plus a weird mix of over and under-feeling. Let me ‘splain.

A couple times I’ve mentioned the weird upheaval of my life here; I can only really deal with spilling bits and bobs of that here. Among other peculiar complexities, I’ve gone almost three months without partnered sex. Other than these last few months, the longest time I’ve gone without partnered sex since I became sexually active was in the summer of 2005, when I had an unfortunate sex accident that left me with torn up labia and the realization that I was fucking a lot of people who I didn’t trust, weren’t capable of taking care of me beyond an orgasm (if that), and had no perception of me beyond my body parts and public persona. That incident really fucked me up – or really, it righted me, made me check in with myself in an intense way.

So this period of celibacy or whatever you want to call it (it’s not like I’m wearing padlocked mittens to bed at night), has been interesting, and actually something I’ve opted for. My sexuality is a very fluid thing, I have a wide range of attractions and all that (which I name bisexual only under duress), but one of the things I’ve realized over the past few months is that since I became sexually active with other people ten plus some odd years ago, I’ve always needed the mirror of other people as a defining crutch. My desire has been mapped largely by the ways in which others desire me – it’s not as simple as “being wanted makes me horny,” though. It used to be exactly that, but now it’s more complex and weird in a way I can’t quite explain right this moment.

When I first started to forgo partnersex last fall, I joked to my friends that I was too sad to do kegels and was losing muscle tone in my vagina. Well, joke in that this is too true and painful to be said with a straight face way (but still – I need vagina bootcamp now). I retreated into this weird shell of myself where I was actually having an aversion to sexual things that I used to find hot. This was to the point where I actually sometimes had this feeling that other people’s desires, the hypersexualized social swirls around me, felt (heavy word but I can’t call it anything else right now) like assault.

In the absence of someone to see it, to call it forth, to stimulate it, to care for it, my sexuality just kind of went away. Which is a kind of fucked up thing in general, but especially for ME, immersed as I am in this world o’ sexuality.

Slowly though, I’ve started to reawaken. Ok, that’s too passive, like whoops I got my libido back! Sometimes it feels like that, but its more accurate to say I’ve been carefully reconstructing this core piece of me, while also giving myself room to not know everything about sex, about myself, about my desires.

I’ve been reorienting myself in this self aware way – this way I’ve never really been about myself. I’ve always been painfully self-critical and analytical – I actually once had a therapist tell me to stop keeping a journal because it was getting in the way of me living my life. But that brain-body connect, the thing that makes sex so powerful, has sometimes been lacking for me. I’ve developed this habit of dressing and undressing in front of a full length mirror. It makes me think about and see myself in a different, more intimate, way. And it’s like checking in. It’s little goofy to say, but the process of getting tattooed has played a big part in this. My orientation to my body has changed pretty radically since I started getting inked a few years ago. Now that I’ve had about 30 hours of tattooing and am close to having my left and right half sleeves complete, it’s made me so very aware of my flesh, how sensitive and tough it is at the same time.

As I’ve gotten well past the midway of repairing my shit, it’s brought me to face a new question. A few weeks ago over a very lovely dinner and a conversation about sex, relationships, and desire, I was asked what I want, how I see those things playing out for me. I have no fucking idea. But not in a non-committal way, if that can even make half-sense. I have my fantasies, but those are different than needs and wants – and I don’t have a picture in my head of my perfect relationship and sex configuration. I suspect that if more people were honest with themselves, more people would admit that they don’t know what the fuck they want either. Instead, I feel like I have to be on the defensive about my cluelessness. But – fuck it. I thought I knew what I wanted and it got sad and fucked up, so it’s back to the drawing board.

Being truly open-minded (which is a nicer and more optimistic way of saying “clueless”) is a mix of exhilarating and terrifying. And the thing I’ve heard myself say to friends a few times about sex and intimacy and my desires for the same is: “I want to be seen.” That much I know to be true. I want understanding and connection in a pure and intense sense. The shape it takes is highly negotiable.