writing

It’s this reverence, this sense of gratitude that’s missing from my masturbation sessions. I’m present with my body but not as present as I could be. I have fallen into a rut, rarely trying new things.  Oh God, I’m experiencing Solo Lesbian Bed Death! I didn’t even know it was a thing! But it sounds familiar right? You’ve been with someone long-term, and the adventure & fire goes out of your lovemaking, rofl. So going into 2020 I vow to do more “solo lovemaking” rather than just jerking off before sleep. To touch myself the way I touch someone I’m deeply in love with, to savor & delight in my own sounds & smells.

I know that my entire life’s work is built around listening to the body, heeding it’s wisdom, but what’s the wisdom in my body’s belief that I’m deliberately & selfishly putting it in harm’s way? I cannot, and don’t want to live a life where I’m literally grounded, unable to move beyond these imaginary borders of city, state, nation, continent. But neither do I want to be at war with my body.

So I sit with this discomfort. And I hope that starting the conversation will be enough to shift it. Now that my body knows that it’s been heard, perhaps we can come to some sort of agreement, some sort of way to move together rather than in conflict.

Even though I don’t have children, I am overwhelmed when I think of the magnitude of her losses & I cannot imagine how she survived as long as she did. Now either she was a mistress of Faking It, her Suppression Game was on fleek (that’s what I believe now), but she managed to live & love & laugh for those 24 years. I did not know that Survivor’s Guilt was killing her until it killed her (not that I have any idea what I would’ve done if I had known--I don’t think I was really cognizant of that as a thing until then). I strongly suspect that having a child to raise is what kept her from sinking into a non-functioning depression born of out everlasting grief.

It became clear that even though I talk a big game about healing from trauma not meaning that you become the person you were before (I used to love flying as a kid), and I fully believe it, I was somehow only applying that to others & not to myself. I hadn’t realized that in the back of my head I was still thinking that I was gonna find the magic lever that would make me believe that riding in a plane is completely safe. She gave me permission to reframe my desire into one that was actually doable: to not let my terror guide my experience.