Liabilities and Assets (things go pop and fizz)

I said it in the comments on my last post, but it’s worth repeating here: thanks very very much for your supportive comments, emails, tweets and other internetty messages. The outpouring of support and sharing of like (and unlike, but resonating) experiences is a good reminder that digital intimacy can be great stuff. I felt immediately better after writing and publishing that post. It’s not always healthy, but I do get a rush and a heightened sense of clarity from making my struggles public. And if my inbox is any indication, me struggling publicly with my shit is helpful to other people as well.

Over the last two days I had some very affirming experiences offline, and that has just made things sing for me a bit. On Monday I spent the day in a retreat with the IWHC communications team, and we spent part of the day talking about the Internet and the challenges of melding new media with non-profit communications styles. There’s a bigger post in that discussion (that’s putting it mildly) - but we were talking about potential conflicts that could arise, and I made myself an example. After that conversation, in which one of my bosses said, “I would defend to the death your right to say anything you want on the Internet,” I think I can finally begin to accept the fact that who I am and where I’ve been is an asset to my employers and not a liability.

I obsess over this a lot. Although intellectually I believe that my work has value, that I myself have value, and I have busted my ass to prove that I’m worth listening to (though hopefully not in a desperate way) - in the depths of my self-doubting core, I can’t help but believe that who I am is a liability, not an asset. I do often feel the need not to apologize, but to explain away, dull the edges of the walking test case scenario that is my life.

This bleeds into every area of my life. Recently I’ve been bemoaning my undateability by saying things like, “Seriously, who is going to want to date a tattooed ex-hooker with an Ivy League education, a book, an award-winning porn film, and an adjunct professor job prior to age 30?” People I say this to are regularly incredulous and tell me that lots of people want that. I say these things about myself with an overtone of negativity - like I’m an entity that needs to be handled or managed (personally or professionally).

I know I need to shake it off, break the record, stop repeating the same story to myself. But it’s hard.

I’ve been teaching a Human Sexuality lecture course at Rutgers this semester, and on Tuesday I got another great affirmation. I co-taught the class in an abbreviated summer session a few months ago, but this semester is my first solo flying college teaching experience. I think I’ve finally hit my stride, now that I only have one more session to teach. I’ve been a bit guarded in class, but a lot of my students have looked me up online so they know the score. Today I taught a session about the sex industry, and I outed myself as a former sex worker. I joked about the weirdness of being a professor with a checkered past, and I said that I’d wager there are other profs on campus who’ve worked in the sex industry, but that I’m probably the only one who will admit it in front of my students. One of my students said that she couldn’t think of a more qualified person to teach the class, and it made me feel really awesome.

So. I have these weird disconnects. I’m not sure what the fuck is going to happen on a variety of levels, but I know I’m on the cusp of awesome. And it’ll get better, and then worse again, and then something else I can’t measure will happen. I have to trust in the changing shape of things - or not, but go with it. When I focus on moments, I feel pretty good and not overwhelmed. I just need to do that more.