Coming Home: Day 31 -- getting curious about radical self love

Today's the last day of National Masturbation Month -- how have these thirty-one days of radical self love treated you? Have you come every day, or loved on yourself most days, or thought more frequently about how your body likes to be tended to? How have you marked National Masturbation Month -- and what are you carrying forward with you? What will you leave here in May?

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For me, self-acceptance is the notion that I am not fundamentally wrong because of my history or physical body. It’s the realization that I am fundamentally right because I am neither my history nor my body. It’s the choice to recognize my humanity just as I recognize and respect the humanity of others. And, sadly, in our culture and in our time, accepting ourselves is really radical. It’s not common. It’s not expected. And, yet, it can be the greatest difference maker in moving forward gracefully in doing the work we are meant to be doing in this world.

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2011/03/08/2122252/what-is-radical-self-acceptance.html#storylink=cpy

- Rosie Molinary, author of Beautiful You

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2011/03/08/2122252/what-is-radical-self-acceptance.html#storylink=cpy

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I'm thinking about radical self care, radical self love, and radical self acceptance -- these are all intertwined, don't you think?

I'm both excited and disappointed that it's May 31; I have been consumed by this daily project, which perhaps has not been the best for my own personal orgasm. It's easy for me to get obsessive, especially about how I'm doing sexually (and by doing, I mean recovering/healing): Are we all better yet? Are we fixed? Can we stop worrying now?


I learned well how to focus overmuch attention on the how of my sex, whether I was doing it right, whether or not (mostly not) I was coming, and why, and what I should be doing about it. I had to spend a lot of my adolescence in those sorts of conversations, whether overtly or covertly. This particular layer of my obsession with sex was fed to me, and I learned to breathe it in order to survive.

Obsession isn't the same as curiosity. What I've found this month is that I am happier and so much more functional when I can be curious about my sex, my desire, my orgasm rather than obsessed about these.

Curiosity, I think, is a feature of radical self love/care/acceptance. What happens when I get curious about this aspect of myself, meet it with love and interest, rather than with knives and hammers and microscopes, ready to study it away, ready to slam it into a new shape?

Here's an interesting definition I found just now:

obsess - haunt like a ghost; pursue;

Haunt like a ghost. Right. Exactly. When I am obsessed, particularly around my healing or my sexuality, I get into a rigid, numb place. It's hard to breathe easily. I want to be fixed now. I take on the characteristics of my old, scared self -- that girl who had to actively interrogate her body just in order to get through the night. I don't have to inhabit that ghost anymore. I can choose to meet this body with different lenses, different stories, different possibility.

I feel like this month of orgasms has invited me into a new relationship with my body, has invited me to consider my blocks and struggles, the places where I'm selfish and the places where I'm generous, where I'm still terrified and overwhelmed, where I'm still armored, where I ride shame, how much I need laughter with my sex, how I release and where I hold tight -- and has invited me to consider every breath a practice. Even coming, particularly for trauma survivors, can be a place of meditation and centering.

This month I got to tell people, over and over, about this project, that I was writing about masturbation and healing, trauma aftermath and radical self care, and got to push more deeply into the shame I hold about the very work that I feel has chosen me, and that I choose every day. For ten years, I have waited for people to tell me that I should be ashamed of myself for doing this work, for talking about powerful sexual desire and sexual trauma in the same breath, in the same workshops, in the same piece of writing (as though their disapproval would mean I had to stop!). But when I talk to people about the work, I am consistently met with encouragement, enthusiasm, curiosity, new ideas and subjects to consider, even tears: we all of us need more spaces to talk about the complexity of our desire and our relationships with our bodies, not fewer. And so, as I move into the end of this first part of the Coming Home project, I am so deeply grateful to get to engage in these conversations, to think critically about the ways we talk about healing in our different communities, to get to revitalize my own relationship with orgasm while doing the other thing I love most in the world: writing.

So thank you for being with me during this month. I look forward to more challenge, questions, laughter and wonder to come.

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Coming Home doesn't stop on this 31 May 2012. I'll be here again tomorrow, June 1, and we're going to be moving within the next week to our own domain, and will continue this curiosity-centered engagement with healing from trauma through (and sometimes against) radical self love and exactly the sorts of orgasms we want. Stay tuned, ok?

Be curious and adoring of your body today -- just exactly as much as you can be. Come again tomorrow. See you then.

Coming Home: Day 30 -- my body is more than a crime scene

I'm not hiding my love anymore...

(2008)

where her body ought to be  

She wants to put her body where her words are, fully into the flavor of sex, stunned with the liquid of meaning and possibility, and the most hostile vulnerability.

This is the skin I settle into, the girl behind the screen, the safely ensconced in pixels or pencils / and yes, writing is an embodying affair / it sloshes your stones with hopes / it asks your nerves to show up for the aching / but I can forget how to breathe today / and I would almost always rather write than fuck / because behind the skin of my page, I can just be that free woman / the one with no safety torn and scabbed beneath her nails / the one whose triggers are taxidermied and mounted on the wall for all to see / they are quiet behind glass when I am writing and cannot startle or snare anybody — not there. When I am writing, my triggers become works of art / almost admirable / almost:

See, that one looks like her sister’s face cluttered over with fallen feathers, the plucked body of a girlchild / and / that one is a diorama of her high school, cardboard cutouts of her graduating class cluttering the forefront, the teenagers’ faces all stained a kind of rakish purple that meant they had eaten the fruit of tomorrow and lived / (Her face is stained only an off-shore eggshell white with what she had to swallow, and there is no tomorrow for her in that picture) / in this one, the boys are all backhanded, they each have a piece of her virginity poking out of their ragged back pockets, though the full flesh of it lives at her house, in her parents’ room / (there’s its carapace, over in the far corner) / there are diagrams — this one here, and that one — of the ceilings she shut her eyes to, and then studied and tried to find shapes within

All these pieces so containable when I write / when I write sex / I can shut the door to this exhibition / leave it for the curator and night staff to tend to its reedy exhalations and stains of saliva / when I’m writing sex, I don’t feel them on my body / I put words where my / body / ought to be able to be

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Today I'm strong in that place of shame, which is shaped around an exhilaration so big that my body doesn't at all know how to hold it. Do we really get to be in love with our bodies? Do we really get to bring joy to all those places that were -- and here I freeze. Were what? Were shat upon and sliced, were called beautiful and desirable by the people who were meant to protect us (I learned to hate being called beautiful), the places in us that were feasted upon?

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In Sex for One: The Art of Self-Loving (that manifesto to the power of masturbation!) Betty Dodson writes:

Masturbation is a primary form of sexual expression. It's not just for kids or for those in-between lovers or for old people who end up alone. Masturbation is the ongoing love affair that each of us has with ourselves throughout our lifetime. 

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The ongoing love affair we have with ourselves throughout our lifetime.

There's a lot I didn't accomplish this month with this blog-project: I wanted to totally alter my relationship to orgasm, free it up (in 31 days!) so I could come exactly how I want, whenever I want. Ok, so maybe that process is still ongoing. Maybe the effects of a month of orgasms is still unfurling in me. Stay tuned -- Coming Home isn't going away after May 31.

This is what I realized the other day, however: that through the course of this month, I have stopped thinking of my body as a crime scene, as aftermath, as a place that ought to have police tape around it. My body is more than the trauma that my stepfather inflicted. My body and psyche are not simply duct-taped battle wounds.

There are scars in here, but more than that -- there's delight. There's forty years of curiosity and exploration. There's this lifetime of reaching out, wanting my skin on the grass, against trees, putting everything in my mouth just to see what it feels like there. There're hugs and tastes and orgasm and sleep and waking and walking in rain and pushing muscles against stone and loving animals and planting seeds and slicing garlic and reading everything my eyes came across and writing late into the night, early into the sunlight, there's candlelight and bubblegum and learning and riding my bike down the tall hills and the smell of jasmine and rosemary and ocean spray and Polaroid cameras and tears and movies and rage in my muscles like ice water and so much laughter that my face will forever be marked with it.

What I'm telling you is, my body-love is larger than my trauma.

Do I have to find the words to express both my joy about this, and the deep reaction from the old voices, the ones that want to keep me/us in the place of simply scrambling to survive?

Thus the walking around in shame and celebration. I'm doing a lot of deep breathing, and listening to the numbness and terror, listening to the old songs, telling those overly-protective parts of myself that they have done an excellent job for these twenty years, and that I am finding them a pasture to live out the rest of their days.

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So yes, today I will continue this love affair with myself. Here's something else Dr. Betty writes: "We need to see sex as an advanced form of moving meditation that grounds in our bodies by getting us out of our self-conscious mind that is constantly chattering away. Practice is always beneficial." 

Yes. Practice. Let's get a conversation with Dr. Betty here onto the Coming Home site, shall we? A woman who's spent the better part of her life advocating for the power and necessity of masturbation (for all of us) will have something to say about healing from trauma and reclaiming our big body-joy.

Be as sweet to you as you can be today. Come exactly as you are. See you again tomorrow.

Coming Home: Day 29 -- Perhaps

On this near-last day of this month of transformative work, I'm hearing all the censor voices, the voices who don't want this writing to happen, the voices who think this work is useless/indulgent/perverted/dangerous/stupid/non-revolutionary. I am hearing the voices of shut it down. I am hearing the voices of you are doing harm. I am hearing the voices of the perpetrators, the afraid, the lost, the broken -- all those voices that still live in my skin.

Here I am writing anyway. All of that might be true: here I am writing anyway.

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I would like to tell you about the orgasms yesterday, but I made a promise to my psychic-inside self that those would be just for me alone, and so I am going to keep that promise. What I will say is that I'm grateful. And sore.

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So I'm going back to the beginning.

(From ACT UP NY) In 1994, at a United Nations World AIDS Day Conference, Dr. Joycelyn Elders (then the Surgeon General of the United Staes) was asked:"...if masturbation might be taught as a way to prevent AIDS?" Joycelyn Elders replied: "masturbation is something that is a part of human sexuality, and is a part of something that perhaps should be taught."  (later she said, "masturbation is really something you don't have to teach.")

She was fired for this: ...perhaps should be taught. Fired, I'll remind you, by our ostensibly-liberal Mr. Clinton. You'll recall what he thought should be taught.


Perhaps, she said. Dr. Elders' statements would still be controversial if uttered today by a public figure. 


This is why I'm writing. This is a why of this blog.


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How and whether you come is entirely your business. The fact is, though, that everyone has the right to deep pleasure, to self-knowledge and self-care, to knowledge and information about bodies and sexuality and sensuality. We get to resurrect the parts of ourselves shoved into a closet, or shoved under our heartbeats, or tossed in the trash, when all we were able to do was survive day to day with our breath intact. Whether or not you want to re/claim those parts of yourself is your business -- don't stand in the way of anyone else's desire do to so.


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Be so sweet to yourself today. I'm practicing the same. Come again tomorrow -- see you then.

Coming Home: Day 28 -- when is it too late?

Today I want much more than my hands on myself, than the water between my legs, than some simple contractions. Today I want the soar of connection, of hands touching, of love in and through a body that didn't expect to do any more, ever, than just survive.

Today I am slippery in all the poems, I am drinking tea and not eating enough, the tears are all stain and open throat, the quiet is broken by the sad songs, the puppy I let myself love is curled into a small groaning ball. Today I am preparing for what has always been my vocation. Today I want to slip out from under the writer/watcher, the part that analyzes and is already crafting description of my every lived moment -- I want to breathe into an unwritten moment. I am writing now, will come later, and I will not tell you about it. Today's orgasm will be just for me. 

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Didn't we have to include this one during this month's ode to the love and struggle of masturbation?

The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator

ANNE SEXTON

The end of the affair is always death.   

She’s my workshop. Slippery eye,   

out of the tribe of myself my breath   

finds you gone. I horrify

those who stand by. I am fed.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

Finger to finger, now she’s mine.   

She’s not too far. She’s my encounter.   

I beat her like a bell. I recline

in the bower where you used to mount her.   

You borrowed me on the flowered spread.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

Take for instance this night, my love,   

that every single couple puts together   

with a joint overturning, beneath, above,   

the abundant two on sponge and feather,   

kneeling and pushing, head to head.   

At night alone, I marry the bed.

I break out of my body this way,   

an annoying miracle. Could I   

put the dream market on display?   

I am spread out. I crucify.

My little plum is what you said.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

Then my black-eyed rival came.

The lady of water, rising on the beach,   

a piano at her fingertips, shame   

on her lips and a flute’s speech.

And I was the knock-kneed broom instead.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

She took you the way a woman takes   

a bargain dress off the rack

and I broke the way a stone breaks.

I give back your books and fishing tack.   

Today’s paper says that you are wed.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

The boys and girls are one tonight.

They unbutton blouses. They unzip flies.   

They take off shoes. They turn off the light.   

The glimmering creatures are full of lies.

They are eating each other. They are overfed.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

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What does it look like to let go of hyper-vigilance, to release the energy that has been focused for twenty years on looking back over all my inside shoulders? What does it look like to have all of this one self present in this one moment, no fragments floating off to keep watch for any interlopers, any threat? What could it possibly mean that I am beginning to imagine such an embodiment, that, in my moments of meditation, I can feel the tremendous relief in my muscles, that I weep (it feels that heavy) with the ability to let my shoulders fall into right here, right now? 

What does it mean to know that I will still get hurt, whether or not I am hyper vigilant, whether or not I was on the lookout for the next assault, whether or not I thought I was protecting myself? What does it mean to breathe into that assurance, let it be just true: not a tragedy, just a human fact?

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I'm all questions and huge hope today, and I think this isn't so hot -- last night I dreamed about the Masturbate-a-thon: I logged in to the site just in time to see a gorgeous friend of mine saying, calling to Carol, that she'd just come. She had her clothes mostly on, a red dress to offset her pale skin and blonde hair, she'd been on her back and had her hands under the dress, the dress was wrinkled where it'd been pushed up around her hips. But when I get to the video stream, she's already pulled the dress back down, her face red and grinning, already re-composing into her public-performance persona. Later in the dream, I got to the Center for Sex and Culture just after the event was over. The room was filled with the energy of the just released, a few stains on the floor (the room was carpeted and in some industrial building, nowhere that the CSC has ever actually been housed during the years I've known about it.) I was disappointed to have worked up the courage to come out for the event and then have missed it, was a little electrified. I helped Carol and Robert with the last of the cleaning up -- 

What can I say about this dream? This line was in a poem I wrote in response to this weekend: too late to find / comfort enough in such small daily moments -- and I wrote, over and over, is it too late for me? I'm forty years old -- is it too late for this embodiment, this understanding and acceptance, this joy, this still-mourning. Is it too late to expect that I will wake up happy tomorrow morning, that my dreams can come so true that I will finally need new ones? Is it too late to take hold of my own hands and bless them? Is it too late to wake up?

I know -- it's a ridiculous question. We can say, reflexively, that it's never too late.


 And yet -- to feel it. To feel it.

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Come again tomorrow, ok? Only and always as you like it. See you then.

Coming Home: Day 27 -- in such close proximity to my own organs.

This evening it all feels very far away -- the orgasms, my body, that strong and clear sense of embodiment. It could be I'm a bit drained, emptied out, the words flushed through me, just sitting inside the edges of my skin, waiting to ripen enough to emerge.

I had high hopes for today: after a workshop this afternoon, and dinner with four friends (two gorgeous adults, two gorgeous kids), I planned to go out dancing. But my eyes are heavy, and I haven't even posted this blog yet -- not to mention, there have been no orgasms yet today, on this the fifth-to-last-day of National Masturbation Month (and the day of the Masturbate-a-thon at the Center for Sex and Culture!) -- what can I do when the heaviness of reality settles in on my shoulders for a long-winter's nap, especially now that it's coming into summer? What can I do with the part of myself that has called itself "reality" for close to half my life, that voice filling my heart cavity just now with words that sound like, "you don't deserve any of this. who are you to claim an unquestioned happiness? who are you to decide when to let go, who are you to trust your instincts, your body, your heart?" This part has swelled me up, and I feel ballooned all through my chest, and breathless, as though there's someone sitting on me.

That weight -- it's terror, ok, sure. But terrified of what? Failure is too easy, I think. I think the terror is way more clearly aimed at success. Afraid of getting exactly where I'm dreaming I could get.

This is the image, I think -- when we remove a bandage that has covered a serious wound, some deep puncture or a broken bone, and we expose that skin, that part of our body, that new scar to the sun, to the dirty air, to the world. That new scar is tender, isn't it? It's our body's newest growth. How do I trust that the world won't slice into me again?

I don't, do I. Isn't that the learning? The hurt will come again. The point is to bare my scars to the mouth of the wor(l)d anyway.

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My dear friend says, "will you get out of your own way?"

How do we recognize that that's what we're doing?

We don't, I think is the point. We need others to show us, tell us. We need friends, folks who love us enough to be honest, to turn us toward the mirrors we've been avoiding and say, look. look at that beauty. those wings are ready for lift-off my friend. come on over here with me to the edge.

We -- I need people who love me enough to encourage me to jump, to risk, to fly. I need people who will be there to fall into, who hold all the tears and flailing, who hold my hands even when it means I am digging my nails in to the tender skin of their palms; I need people who will know when to grit their teeth against the pain, and when to pull my fingers away and let me go.

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Just for today, I am ready to stop writing in such close proximity to my own organs. I'm going to go come now -- I don't see dancing in this evening's plans, although, if I had just a bit more energy, dancing would be the day's orgasm, without question.

2.20.12
( prompt: air time )
This is what wants airing, this naked raw emotion under the armor, the stuff beneath where I am so protected with you these days, I want to let it all out in a mess, the heap of me, untended, not folded or neatly presses; let me be uncontained, let the rush push through and notice, after, what clings, what has stuck and stained, and where. I 'll already be gone and after this onslaught you won 't be clean but you will be washed through with all my old wanting, too-horned angers and the fears with teeth that chewed at my belly for years. How long before we let go the nice and plesant raging, before we unswallow before we untether uncatch unhold unbend unleash?

Let's be easy with all these good bodies, and the joy fear terror loss wanting hollow singularity indignation ease hope exhaustion exhilaration that all twines around within us, into our spaces of peace and into our spaces of shame. Here's to breathing anyway. Here's to what home actually looks like: practice.

See you tomorrow. Come just exactly as you wish.

Coming Home: Day 26 -- the levels of reclamation

I'd love to tell you how it feels. 

When it's riding you out to the sky, and your whole body is huddled in a point, and then it rockets away from you on waves. I guess something about the ocean says it best. The smell. The origin there. Conceived and then burst into a billion cells. I mean we have all been intimate with the deepest creative experience: we've all been born. 

I think people who are lost, that's what they're most let from. And sex. Well that is one of the simplest and most thrilling ways to get it back again. 

- Summer Brenner, from "Let Me Tell You How It Feels," in The Erotic Impulse: Honoring the Sensual Self (David Steinberg, ed.)

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This morning was quick-ish, riding hard on the water and images not from a book, not from my own imagining, but a story you told me.

A story you told me... do you remember?

Do you know what that means?

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Twenty years ago, in 1992, I was a college sophomore in New Hampshire. I lived in a single room in a small dorm, right down the road from the co-ed fraternity where I would come out later that summer, maybe in a month or less. Twenty years ago this month, I still was a straight girl, dating a musician who also lived in my dorm. He had been to my home in Omaha, had met the abuser I called stepfather, did not understand why I cried so much, did not understand why I broke up with him and then begged him to come back to me. He wrote melancholy songs. Twenty years ago, the only "sexual" stories that got whispered to me, I mean the only fantasies offered directly into my ears when I was supposed to be getting off to them, were given by my stepfather, over the phone, during calls he made during breaks between his patients, or when he was home alone. (How do I use the word give, like it was a generosity, a kindness? I use the words of my experience -- the violence was like that. Tender. Acquiesced to, ostensibly requested.)

It was my stepfather who first encouraged me to write about sex, but that came a year later.

When I went away to school, the way he continued to hold on to his control was via the tether of the phone. He kept me on the phone for hours, interrogating me about whatever psychological issue he'd decided I was suffering from and needed processing, conversations my sister and mother often also had to be present for, all of them sitting around the speaker phone down in the basement office or in the living room, me wrapping the white, twenty-foot cord around my arm, while I sat on my straight-backed wooden desk chair, looking out at the small clearing between my building and the Shabazz house.

And then, when my mother and sister were not present, he called and used a different voice. He wanted to come for me, or wanted me to come for him. And he already knew, didn't he already know, that I would be able to actually come for him -- even over that distance, even from 1500 miles away, even without his body directly presenting its threat, he knew I wouldn't fake it. I was that adapted to his control. I was that interested in being worthy of escape, worthy of release. I believed him when he said that eventually he would stop and let me go (it would be another year and a half before I understood that he would never let me go willingly, that I would have to chew through the meat of my family and step out, clean bone, empty, orphaned, ready to be taken down for the audacity of wanting to determine my own body's trajectory).

He gave me his fantasies, pushed them at me, wanted them to make me come. I learned to close my ears; the only way I could come during these instances of violence were when I shut out all external input -- which, of course, was only mostly possible: still the words of vaguely non-consensual-but-ultimately-desired sex with minors, still the feeling of the vibrator on me, still the sound of his breath. I would shove into my own fantasy, get away from what he was doing in my ears -- and the times that he came, alone, he called "quickies," and it was my job to pretend like those turned me on.

I learned to hate the phone. I did not share my true fantasies. When I asked for those of others, I mostly wanted the power of knowing something intimate about them. I certainly never wanted anyone to talk to me over the phone about their fantasies while I fucked myself. It almost never happened.

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Twenty years ago I looked into a future that had no shape, and sex rode the place of distance -- masturbation was both an attempt to give myself a little pleasure, and a pure rehearsal of trauma. Twenty years ago, I had no certainty about not getting away, because I could not see a future for myself at all.

Today I am stretching a ghost hand back to that girl, offering her a bold promise of embodiment. Today I am promising her it gets better, even though first it will get much much worse. Today I am holding her hand the way she, in a month and a half, will hold the hand of another woman during sex with a  group of friends, the way that she, later, will hold the hand of a family member. Today I am cupping her sallow cheeks in my two hands: It isn't just about getting free, Jen -- it's much much more than either of us could imagine. It's about finally getting to fill out the long breadth of our skin. It's about getting to tell the truth about what we want and pursue it. It's about getting to welcome the sound of someone else's desires and not being held captive or manipulated by those. It's about home, Jen. You will get home. It will be harder than anything you can imagine now. But you will get home. And home will be this body that you are so desperate to escape from.


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If it feels right, let the sun on your body today, in your eyes, let the sun caress the soft skin of the ones still living on the insides of your bones, the ones in you that you protect by your very existence. Come just as you are. See you again tomorrow.

Coming Home: Day 25 - one more for the road

Who can get enough?
I've got one more for this hungry Friday...

A gorgeous poem posted today by my friend R_, in honor of National Masturbation Month ...

Listening to Your Hunger

 From the other side of the door
I hear your breath escape in deep
irregular bursts followed by
sharp instantaneous inhales
and the occasional moan.

I know you are trying to be quiet
and have Enigma in the headphones
with your eyes shut tight, imagining

(go go go read the rest)

How are you listening/honoring your hunger? Take it out for this long weekend (or for whatever moments you can spare, if you don't have a long break) and let it stretch its wings...

Come again soon...

Coming Home: Day 25 -- do it because it's good for the world

This morning I am thinking about how we take care of ourselves even at the moments we are sure that we least deserve it, when I know for sure that I am the last person in the world who needs to be giving herself an orgasm because, after all, I've hurt people, I've done awful things, I have so much work to do -- I should be helping to create the space for someone else to feel good in and about themselves, but who am I to believe that that pleasure and ease could be for me?

There are also those times when we are engaged in battle, and it's clear, 100% clear, that sex/sexuality/desire/erotic self care is not at all revolutionary -- is taking energy away from the fight. How can I think about sex or orgasm when I know there are women being beaten in their homes this very minute, when my next door neighbor might be raping his child right now, when there are animals being tortured, when someone is getting deluged with harassment, when people are suffering, hungry, hurting, houseless, harming one another? There were years, when I was working for an anti-domestic violence organization in Maine, that it was difficult to have sex, and for reasons beyond my own trauma struggle-- I couldn't get my head around how I could spend any time thinking about my own pleasure when the world was so fucked up, when women I knew and was working with were in their homes, or having to flee those homes, terrified?

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In the dream, the door was open to the place where I was staying -- an apartment or hotel room? -- and I was afraid it had been broken into. I was afraid someone was after me, or had come for me. Interestingly, every time I've had a dream like this before, my certainty was that it was my stepfather who had come for me; not this time -- it was someone else. I hesitated, felt the rush of oh no, as well as a surge of curiosity. Who's in there? I went ahead on in through the door; I would not be kept out of my own space by fear.

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The truth is that if I don't attend to my own pleasure, to what brings me joy, to what soothes and replenishes me, then it's not possible for me to be of service to anyone or any movement for very long. When I try to just give and give, taking care of others at the expense of my own wellness, I can be assured that burnout is right around the corner.

And wow did I burn out when I was working at those two anti-DV agencies (one in Maine, one here in CA): after leaving those jobs, all I could do for months was sit and look out the window. I was completely drained, felt like a profound failure because I'd been unable to continue in the work, and did not understand how anything could ever change. People were always going to treat each other badly. People were always going to assume that their partners were their property, so they could treat them however they wanted -- right? Nothing was ever going to change.

This mindset was entirely the result of not having a self-care practice. The only thing I've ever done to take care of me, or at least the most consistent practice, is to journal. Now, writing has saved me -- but it also can keep me close in to whatever is troubling me in the moment. It took me years (and I'm still trying to let it all the way in) to allow for other interests and practices: exercise, dancing, playing with pups, gardening, hanging out with friends.

In Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others (which I think every single person should read, no matter what your work is -- all of us are shepherding someone through trauma, ourselves included), Laura van Dernoot Lipsky reminds me that if I don't take care of my own business, I can't be of service to anyone. She writes:

People may come to believe that feeling happy or lighthearted is a betrayal of all the countless humans, creatures and environments that are under siege on this planet. They may act as if the only way they can express solidarity with suffering of any kind is by suffering themselves. Even for many well-intentioned, noble, responsible people the scope of disease, hardship, and pain from the individual to the global level can be overwhelming. P{eople who experience a sense of helplessness may come to believe there is nothing to be done but keep their heads down and hope for the best. 

Somewhere between internalizing an ethic of martyrdom and ignoring ongoing crises lies the balance we must find in order to sustain our work. The more we can attend to this balance, the greater our odds of achieving a sustainable practice of trauma stewardship. (p.16)

This was the mindset I had while working for these agencies - if others are suffering, shouldn't I be suffering, too? Won't that let them know that I really care, I'm really down for the struggle, I'm here?

And further along in the book, she writes:

...we know that if we want to decrease the suffering in our world, we will need to learn a behavior that is fundamentally different from the ones that have caused such pain and destruction. We must open ourselves to the suffering that comes with knowing that there are species we can't bring back from extinction, children we can't free from their abusive homes, climate chang we can't reverse, and wounded veterans we can't immediately heal. We must also open ourselves to the hope that comes with understanding the one thing we can do. We can always be present for our lives, the lives of all other beings, and the life of the planet. Being present is a radical act. It allows us to soften the impact of trauma, interrupt the forces of oppression, and set the stage for healing and transformation. Best of all, our quality of presence is something we can cultivate, moment by moment. It permits us to greet what arises in our lives with our most enlightened selves, thereby allowing us to have the best chance of truly repairing the world. (p.245)

(I'm not kidding; you want to read this book. Go order your copy.)

When I first met the concept of quality of presence in van Dernoot Lipsky's Trauma Stewardship training, I was completely blown away; I felt both deeply sad, and also hopeful. I became aware that the quality of my presence was entirely lacking -- scattered, diffuse. I understood that I believed I didn't deserve to just be present -- wasn't there something else I needed to right now? How can I take time out for presence?

The hopeful part was this: if people are talking about such a thing as quality of presence, maybe it can be changed. Maybe I can learn to do it differently.
~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~

I also became aware of how scared I was of just being present, which brings me back to coming, to being in my body. This year, I am being called to notice how I'm present in my body, and when I come --

So today the orgasm was a little melancholy, layered, joyous, engaged.I felt the way my body tenses slow but sure, how my muscles pull into themselves, tightening toward the center of me, everything getting harder and harder. I noticed my emotions: hopeful, scared, urgent, uncertain, angry, sad, excited.

(Can we just talk about the soundtrack? I am a girl of my age -- I've had music in and around my every step since about the seventh or eighth grade. First, at the beginning of my rise, was this one, Ingrid Michelson's Keep Breathing. Just gorgeous -- How's that for our theme today, oxygenating our quality of presence? And at the end, just as I came: As the Rush Comes -- which, come on.Sometimes Pandora gets it just right.)

As I rose, I was present with how hard it is for so many of us just to be with our bodies, how we have internalized the training of distance, how the safest place, so often, is away from this skin. And so, when I came, I had that rush of laughter, joy, then breathed hard into the almost-tears.

 We do it anyway. We take care of ourselves even though we were trained not to, even though we were called selfish, awful, self- centered, uncaring. We allow ourselves to open back into these gorgeously difficult bodies even through we have learned the ways of pain there. We cultivate our quality of presence with and in our own skin-- and in so doing, we love the world. We open more space for more presence. We offer joy and contractions and waves of pleasure into what those in power would have us only meet with struggle, rage, loss, lack.

Keep practicing that place of gentleness with you; that's the only way forward. Come just as you wish. See you tomorrow.

Coming Home: Day 24 - all open-mouthed hunger

In my dream, I am both intensely hungry and eruptive, bursting out of my very skin. I can't remember much of it at all, just the feeling, just the sense that I am consuming everything and releasing, pushing out, emerging.

In this month, this year so far, I have met the layers and depths and nuances of my hunger -- and it scares the shit out of me. We're not supposed to admit that we're as hungry as we are: for food, yes, and for desire, for success, adventure, family, love, creative expression, sex, sensation, books, words, color, sound, texture, travel, people, bodies, skin, poetry, flame, performance, space, freedom -- it's all open-mouthed hunger here, which is not necessarily a safe/protected space from which to meet the world. Yet, here's this May-me, walking with my tongue hanging out, wanting to lick everything.

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I've missed my morning come-then-blog practice, so I'm trying it again today: flew out of bed to the computer, then am going to shower before I take Sophie out. I want to be with you in the morning.

The orgasm comes a little harder today, hard in all the ways, because my body/psyche doesn't want any fantasy between me and the sensation, just wants to come to exactly that experience, no distractions. I don't yet have words for what's scary about that -- just know that I have to stop a lot, overwhelmed, panting, reassuring the self inside that's scared of just being here. Then I start talking to myself/the maybeness that's moving against me: don't stop, that's it, god yes, just there. I practice. Then two of my favorite songs in a row come on the pandora station, and so I am not distracted even by new music. It's this line playing while I come: happiness hit her like a bullet in the back. Yes. It's like that sometimes, isn't it?

Speaking of hunger -- that song contains this line as well: And I never wanted anything from you -- except everything, and what was left after that, too.

(right?)

(speaking of dog days -- now the puppy needs to go out)
~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~

It's not at all surprising to me that I have gotten sick just now: two days in a row, I have made powerful connections with women who are inviting me to own my hunger around profession & avocation (this in addition to the hungers I'm meeting and owning here, through this blogging, through my morning/daily masturbation practice) -- and I left each those meetings feeling like a cloud of angry bees was swarming just under my skin, having awakened the censors/editors/sef-protective armoring that wants me to leave well enough alone, to be satisfied with my life being pretty good. Pretty good is damn good when you're coming from torture and rape, right? Do you really need to go for more than that? Why invite loss, disappointment, failure, embarrassment?

Midwestern girls, don't we learn to be satiated? Be quiet? Don't we learn that we're meant to take whatever comes to us with a goddamn smile on our faces, and not ask for seconds?

In the dive deep group (the manuscript/special projects group that I run through writing ourselves whole), we talk about how hungry we are for our own goddamn words, and then we live with the shame of that -- we, women, we're not supposed to want so much. Even we evolved feminist/post-feminist/post-modern women, we women who take everything in our hands like salt, we are still so indoctrinated -- we have not escaped that training to be good girls: and good girls are not hungry.

What will happen if we are hungry? What's the message? That we'll be disappointed? That we'll be sluts, and thereby outside of polite society? That we'll deserve whatever we get? She said she was hungry, officer -- so, you know, I just thought that was an open invitation.


What if we get to be both ravenous and in control, in choice, deciding entirely what comes into our mouths?
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This is not the blog of a good girl -- but releasing that good girl is hard damn work. So I eroticize her. I let her live in bottom space, I let her climb into my fantasy life. She can to excel there; it doesn't serve my whole self if she's allowed to excel at being in charge of my life.

That good girl makes a good bottom: she likes to do what you tell her to, wants to be the very best one at following the rules, and she really likes to know that you think she's doing well. It makes her just want to serve you more.

~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~
Use everything -- that's what all the writing books say, and that's what we are learning/reminding ourselves through this daily orgasm practice (and I don't mean the royal we there, I mean all the women I know who are engaged in an orgasm-a-day during this National Masturbation Month): even the trauma memory, even the 'bad' fantasies, even the loss, even the numbness and dissociation: it can all be a part of self-care, it can all be retrained to serve this now-self, it can all be acceptable until I decide to release, until I'm ready to let go.

Off into the world now, mouth open. Holding this hunger in the palms of my hands. I get to feed it to you; I get to be fed. How's that for radical self care, transformative healing?

Be so good to your hungry self today. Come exactly as you are. See you tomorrow.

Coming Home: Day 23 -- dissociating (to) orgasm

Today I have the sick that was percolating in me yesterday -- and somehow, in spite of the fact that I felt physically worse when I woke up today than I did yesterday, I felt like coming this morning. I dedicated my orgasm to wellness -- let's hope it takes.


(I got that idea of dedicating orgasms from our hero Annie Sprinkle, who does all number of fabulousness around orgasms and wellness and world health.) 


Anyway, right now it's later, I've got my tissues, my stuffy nose, my tea and saltines, and am still going to blog about orgasms. Let's hear it for the glamorously sexy life of a sex blogger.


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This morning, as I settled in under the water, I was thinking about dissociation and masturbation (how's that for meta?) -- the truth is, I don't always fantasize about sex when I'm masturbating; in fact, when I first get started, I think about almost anything but sex: plans for the day, how sweet it was to play w Sophie out in the park, what I new to add to the shopping list, what I'm going to write here. After learning to fully dissociate while also experiencing extreme clitoral stimulation (as with a vibrator), I know how to both feel the pound of the water against me and keep it at a distance -- it's quite possible for me to have a vibrator on my clit for an hour or more and not be any closer to actually coming than when I started, if I don't really pay attention. I have to focus, as with a kind of meditation, if I want to be in the rise to orgasm.

Did you ever hear that joke with the punch line, 'Beige. I think I'll paint the ceiling beige.' In my memory, it's a blonde getting fucked who doesn't know enough to pay attention to what's happening to her. I went and looked it up -- it's actually a three part joke: what's the difference between having sex with a prostitute, your mistress, and your wife? The prostitute asks you, "Aren't you done yet?" Your mistress asks you, "Oh, honey, can't we do it again?" and your wife says, "Beige -- I think I'll paint the ceiling beige."


Now, I think I heard that joke back in college. The only bit that persisted for me was the punchline, because it sounded exactly like something I might think during sex -- not because I wasn't interested in the person I was having sex with, not because I wasn't turned on or didn't want to be there, but because it was just so easy to float away, and it was hard work having to be so present all the time. Sex, for me, is an active clause -- even sex by myself. 


It's somewhat embarrassing to find myself thinking, "Beige..." when I have my hands on my own clit, and I'll admit that I start wondering about my own technique, but the truth is that it's just trauma aftermath, and I give myself a break. 


~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~

I have two orgasm stories to tell you, related to this business of dissociation & focusing in:

1) This morning, I laughed at myself when I found that I was planning out a blog about dissociation while I was trying to come for that same blog. Just too many layers of recursivity there. So I took a breath, brought my awareness back in to my body, and had that thought about dedicating my orgasm to my wellness, to the wellness of us all. Then, I'll tell you, I came pretty fast, in spite of my body aches and the fact that it was a bit hard to breathe. I'm still on these exposure/exhibitionism fantasies, which are working.


2) One night at Hedgebrook, I found my head wandering when I was well into masturbating, and getting toward that place in my rise when I'm going to actually pitch over into coming. I kept the vibrator on me, moving it just slightly, while I began to imagine (totally unintentionally) my new apartment (which I hadn't moved into yet): I could see the cozy living room, darkness from the bedroom and office and hallway; there was a pot of soup simmering on the stove, and the windows were steaming -- outside it was dark, stormy, and the sounds of rain pounded all around. I saw my pup, curled up on a pillow in the living room, sleeping and comfortable and relaxed. And then I saw myself, in the bedroom, on top of the covers, masturbating -- Outside of the fantasy, in my little double bed in the cabin at Hedgebrook, I had this thought: We're going to be all right. It's going to be ok. And then I came hard, crying and laughing at the same time, to an image of myself safe and good in a new life.

That is (yes, here I go, spelling it out), sometimes we can use exactly the skills that were meant to take us away from sex to bring us in, by the back door if need be. We use it all.

Frankly, I consider that latter orgasm to be profound visioning work.

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I'm about to settle into an evening with Law and Order and some soup, hopefully an early-to-bed. Sometimes radical self care looks like an orgasm for the sick girl; sometimes masturbation looks like curling up with a blanket and Emergen-C. I'm grateful for this space, for you there with your eyes, for the space to push into these layers around self-love and longing.

See you tomorrow. Take your vitamins, ok? Come just as you are.

Coming Home: Day 22 - a poem

not in a space today for blogging -- but poems, yes, always:

At a Window

by Carl Sandburg

Give me hunger,  

O you gods that sit and give  

The world its orders.  

Give me hunger, pain and want,  

Shut me out with shame and failure 

From your doors of gold and fame,  

Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger!  

  

But leave me a little love,  

A voice to speak to me in the day end,  

A hand to touch me in the dark room 

Breaking the long loneliness.  

In the dusk of day-shapes  

Blurring the sunset,  

One little wandering, western star  

Thrust out from the changing shores of shadow.

Let me go to the window,  

Watch there the day-shapes of dusk  

And wait and know the coming  

Of a little love. 

xo to you today. xo to this body. be easy, and come again tomorrow, ok? 

Coming Home: Day 21 - 'a passionate and precise interrogation'

Again again, late in the night, here I am at the computer, at the keyboard, candle flickering, wanting to give you what moved through me hours ago when I came in the middle of the day.

This blog was not at all what I imagined it would be -- it's a record of orgasms, sure, but also a record of an imploded routine, of a body relearning its way through each every day. It's a record of emotions and longings, of fantasies, of erotic rhythms, of questions and new curiosities. 

It's also a place of silences, unspokens, a record of what isn't being said.

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Some questions I have, just now, about my body and my desire:

What would it look like to have sex not be centered around even some small panic about whether or not I might be able to come?

What does it mean to claim and share exactly how I like to come?

How many different ways can I allow another to accompany me into the place of orgasm?

What happens if I give permission to my body, and a precise and exacting forgiveness, for all the ways we've learned to come, all the ways we've accepted orgasm, all the fantasies that have served us?

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From Hélène Cixous' "The Laugh of the Medusa":

I have been amazed more than once by a description a woman gave me of a world all her own which she had been secretly haunting since early childhood. A world of searching, the elaboration of a knowledge on the basis of a systematic experimentation with the bodily functions, a passionate and precise interrogation of her erotogeneity. This practice, extraordinarily rich and inventive, in particular as concerns masturbation, is prolonged or accompanied by a production of forms, a veritable aesthetic activity, each stage of rapture inscribing a resonant vision, a composition, something beautiful. Beauty will no longer be forbidden. 

I wished that woman would write and proclaim this unique empire so that other women, other unacknowledged sovereigns, might exclaim: I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of torrents that I could burst -- burst with forms more beautify than those which are put up in frames and sold for a stinking fortune. And I, too, said nothing, showed nothing; I didn't open my mouth, I didn't repaint my half of the world. I was ashamed. I was afraid, and I swallowed my shame and my fear. I sad to myself: You are mad! What's the meaning of these waves, these floods, these outbursts? Where is the ebullient, infinite woman who, immersed as she was in her naiveté, kept in the dark about herself, led into self-distain by the great arm of parental-conjugal phallocentrism, hasn't been ashamed of her strength? Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives (for she was made to believe that a well-adjusted normal woman has a ... divine composure), hasn't accused herself of being a monster? Who, feeling a funny desire stirring inside her (to sing, to write, to dare to speak, in short, to bring out something new), hasn't thought she was sick? Well, her shameful sickness is that she resists death, that she makes trouble. 

And why don't you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you, your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven't written. (And why I didn't write before the age of twenty-seven.) Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it's reserved for the great -- that is for 'great men'; and it's 'silly.' Besides, you've written a little, but in secret. And it wasn't good, because it was in secret, and because you punished yourself for writing, because you didn't go all the way, or because you wrote, irresistibly, as when we would masturbate in secret, not to go further, but to attenuate the tension a bit, just to take the edge off. And then soon as we come, we go and make ourselves feel guilty -- so as to be forgiven; or to forget, to bury it until the next time... 

  ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~

More questions:

How can we push all the way into what we really long for, give ourselves fully over to it, allow our world to shift in order to accommodate that truth, desire, avocation?

What if these bodies don't need forgiving at all?

What if we keeping secret all the things we were taught were shameful about ourselves? What if we take space for the telling, the revelation, the sharing -- what if we allow for more "me, too!" moments of profound connection and de-isolation?

How can I more passionately interrogate this body? More lovingly? How can I more precisely listen to (and record, and respond to) my body's requests, longings, silences, stillnesses, hungers, satiations, fires, quenchings, liquidities, resiliences, metabolizings, strengths, breakings, vulnerabilities -- alongside, right stroking up against, the trauma aftermaths, the triggers, the numbnesses, the absencings, the dissociations, the losses?

How hungry do I get to be? For how much? And how well can I record it?

~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~

Today's was a fantasy that shifted like a dream, from me on my knees before you to you on your knees before me, from us in the classroom to us in the wings of a theater, from you about to come to me, yes, coming, there under the water -- I fell into the fantasy, let the images unfold, let myself exactly narrate, tell myself the story the way I might write it, the way I might tell you if we were on the phone. I made myself wait for the good part, made myself listen for zippers and instructions, smelled chalk dust and sweat. I got overly excited, had to pull the water away several times, panting, eyes closed, oh god I'm so close. Then I put the water back on against my lips, my clit, and shove one more bit further up over that plateau. You know that feeling; do you?

Is this awful?: what nudged me just that last inch over the edge was the image of my own cunt, exposed, public, imagining myself exposed to you just when you can't react, when no one else could see but you -- and in my own mind's eye, that omniscient narrator of fantasies, I could see, too. Here I was, internally, in the experience of both voyeur and exhibitionist, and I came hard, imagining your reaction, you taking what had been so brazenly offered to you. Of course, in your taking me, in my own fantasy, I am taking myself. I am getting off to the image of my own body, your arousal, my desirability, my own audacity.

~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~
And why don't you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you, your body is yours, take it. 


Say it over and over again.
"Writing is for you, you are for you, your body is yours, take it."

Take it, as hard or as easy as you like. Come again tomorrow. See you then.

Coming Home: Day 20 - what gets to be orgasmic?

I am tired tonight, after a full full day, in which there has been, as yet, no orgasm. No traditional orgasm, that is. I mean, no climax of an explicitly, physiologically sexual nature. No -- wait, what was the definition I found so early on in this month?-- no "physical and emotional sensation experienced at the peak of sexual excitation, usually resulting from stimulation of the sexual organ and usually accompanied in the male by ejaculation."(Gotta love those male-centric dictionaries.)

Here, though, is the rest of that definition for orgasm:

2. an instance of experiencing this.

3. intense or unrestrained excitement.

4. an instance or occurrence of such excitement.

Now, there has been intense and unrestrained excitement, several instances of such, in fact:

 1. excellent physical exercise, complete with a lot of sweat and panting (got to run around the lake for the first time in a few weeks)

2. there were jellyfish in the lake when we went out there this morning. Jellyfish. In a lake. (Yes, I know it's tidal. Still exciting. Unrestrainedly such.)

3. We got to play out at the shore this evening, while there was an eclipse going on. I kept pausing in the ball-thowing to glance up sharp at the sun, catching peripheral glimpses of the bite that the moon was taking out of our star. Still more excitement.

Do those get to be orgasmic? What gets to be claimed as the peak of sexual excitation? If I am in my body, full of joy, erupting with the surprise of laughter and delight -- does that get to have a layering of orgasmic pleasure?

~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~
Many people just kept walking around the lake this morning, while Sophie and I were knelt down next to the edge, bent over, looking in at the bobbles of white fringed fabric moving through the water. They had on their headphones, they were on a mission, they had a schedule to keep, they know better than to get close to the edge, they did not pay attention to people doing something unusual in the vicinity of their exercise -- this is Oakland: everyone's doing something unusual.

It was a pleasure, though, when a father and son stopped near us after glancing over into the horror that can be the Lake Merritt water (filled with murk and garbage, birdstain and tadpoles, small fish, human leftovers) to see what we were looking at. They spoke in Mandarin, I think, or another Chinese dialect, they were still there several minutes later when Sophie and I finally picked up to head home for breakfast. We passed other folks who had slowed to study the water, to wonder over these invaders. We -- neighbors who otherwise might not even acknowledge one another -- got to make eye contact with each other, say, Did you see the jellyfish? I know, aren't they gorgeous? We got to grin delightedly, like small ones, with such pleasure at this simple thing: what are jellyfish doing in our lake? I laughed out loud each time my eyes fell on another of those sheer undulant forms, their multiplicitous cilia filigreeing around the outermost lip of themselves --

Doesn't that get to be an orgasmic kind of pleasure? Can we keep on expanding what orgasm gets to hold?

~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~

I'll admit that I thought about the body, as the puppy and I jog-walked back up from the lake toward our apartment. I thought about Lake Merritt as both beloved and reviled -- how we admire its nighttime light-ringed reflective surface, and then cast aspersions in the morning at the smells that rise up in the new sunlight, at the trash drifting into its crevices through which the ducks and geese push to find interesting new tastes. I'll admit I was hunting for a parallel, maybe for a metaphor.

What stunning resilience is so close to our every day that we take, consistently, for granted? What do we adore in only the right light? What do we diminish with our language of garbage and disgusting and horror?

And what gives us the singularity of ordinary miracle when we just show up with our eyes and breath and attention, look around at what we might otherwise consider distraction or a waste of time?

It's true, I can work too hard for a metaphor, a bearing over or into, sometimes. But this one is worth it, I think.

~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~

I'm off to bed now, where I'll lay my hands on myself and give thanks for this day, for these pleasures, for all the layers of orgasm I already got to welcome.

See you tomorrow. Come again, ok? In all the ways you can.



And I thought, on the way hoe

Coming Home: Day 19 - using all of it

[burst into fire]

Once again it's the end of the day before I can blog -- it's a workshop Saturday, and so after a morning orgasm (big and upending -- more about that in a minute), it's rush to eat, get Sophie to her playdate and get back to set up for the writing. After an workshop filled with excellent words and gorgeous community, I went with a friend to another friend's and we made incredible food and played music and with kids and were generally California and fabulous and laughed and maybe cried a little inside and out and got to just be in these lives of ours. Who gets this?

These are my questions today (just two of very many more, actually): what does it mean to get to have orgasm be a routine part of my day? (Today's was not routine, but still.) And: what does it mean to have writing and workshops just be a regular part of how I spend my time? (That is, not set apart, not special, not anxety-provoking -- just... my real life.)

~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~
 I want to give you this paragraph from The Chronology of Water, a memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch. I want, actually, to give you the whole book. Please go find this book and read it. This is a book about trauma and recovery, which is the most horrifyingly reductive thing I could say about it. It's a true story about the ways we get damaged, how we damage others in our attempts to heal and just fucking survive, it's a story about loss and wanting, the thick desire to keep living even amid the coping mechanisms that just lead us around by death, it's about a true and messy kind of resurrection. I was going to loan my copy to everyone I know, but now I can't let it out of my hands, so I just want you to go buy it, please, so that we can talk about it.

I'm just going to give you this paragraph about the narrator masturbating after she has just stood all the way up to a father who has been mean, controlling, abusive, and devastating for much of her childhood -- but I can't give you the whole paragraph, and so you won't get everything it means for her to take her hands to herself in this moment. In this chapter, she is taking down the suitcase that used to be her father's; she's going to use it to pack the things she's taking with her to college, a school he didn't want her to go to. He catches her in the garage, where she is pulling down the suitcase, and begins to scream at her about how selfish and shitty it is that she's leaving. Yuknavitch writes this, about that:

My sister and I, we were selfish. We wanted selves. There was no rage or love that could stop us. That's what opened my mouth.
Fuck
You.
Motherfucker.
(pp. 50-51)

Then there's a bit more confrontation -- I don't want to give it all to you now, because I want you to find and read this book. But here's what happens, after she gets through it:

I carried the suitcase to my bedroom. I went in. I closed the door behind me. I took off my clothes. My skin smelled like chlorine and sweat. Summer heat snuck through the screen of my window. I put my head down on my pillow. I waited. I heard a car go by. I heard a dog bark. I could hear a shiver of wind in the shrubs outside my window. And Cicadas. And frogs. I waited and waited. And then I didn't I put my hand between my legs. I parted my lips. The wet slid my fingers around and around and fast and hard. I closed my eyes. I thought about Sienna Torres shoving her fingers up my wide open cunt, as open as a mouth screaming motherfucker. I came so hard it shot out of me. I didn't know until that night a girl body could do that. Shoot cum. (pp. 51)

Do I have to tell you how hard I fell into this book after reading this paragraph? There, this character, this young woman, this girl claiming all of her prowess and fear right under her fingers right there in the threat that was the aftermath of that argument.

Go get this book from the library, from the bookstore, from your friend who has a copy. Read it read it read it. Keep your hands on your body while you do. Keep your hands on your pen.
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Here part of what was not routine about today's orgasm -- I came hard and strong under the water, in the tub, fully immersed in the fantasy of being watched, being observed; I let myself fully into that desire, did not concern myself with the well-being of this watcher, did not even perform much as I thought about her/them/you catching a glimpse / listening / looking in on me. Shar Rednour writes, in the Femme's Guide to the Universe, about allowing oneself to be an OoD (Object of Desire), to be objectified in all the right ways (she writes about letting ourselves have OoDs, too, and getting to consensually objectify our lovers sometimes as well!), and this morning, this is what I was imagining: I'm in here, making all this noise, taking care of myself so well, and the object of my affection is out there, on the other side of the curtain just listening, or able to see me but not able to touch -- and the fact that she's getting so turned on watching/listening to me turned me on further, which, you see, just becomes the best feedback loop ever.

It was a little scary to give myself over all the way into this fantasy, feels selfish, almost mean. And what happened, then, was that I used those feelings, too. Look at how fucking selfish she is, how mean she's being. Doesn't that make you hotter? Use it all. Implosion. I'm telling you.

This evening I'm tired, want quiet, don't want to write about orgasms; more, I want to be having them, and then drifting off to sleep. I'm going to take some tea and read instead, maybe go back into my re-reading of The Chronology of Water.  More tomorrow. There are still thirteen more days of this marathon.



Did you like how you were good to you today? Come tomorrow, as you want. See you then.

Coming Home: Day 18 - can orgasms be romantic?

Today, I'll tell you, I was in a movie.

Sometimes having the radio on can do that, make me feel like I'm right in the climax-- and not the orgasm-y kind, necessarily, though those played a part in today's imaginings. No, it's more like pushing into that part where the heroine is finally experiencing her big change, is swelling all the way into the kiss or getting the big phone call from a publisher or agent that will change her life or she gets in the car, finally finally, and you can see that she's really going to go this time-- she's going. She's going.

What if the movie gets to be your real life?

The song that got me today was Azure Ray's Sleep-- Some songs just sound like they're meant to be around the heartbeat of a movie and this is one of those (and then I go look for the video, and check it out! The song was used in the film The Devil Wears Prada. Natch). In the movie that played in my head as this song poured into the bathroom, this is what I could see: a woman, let's say, who's gone through quite a bit of shit around her sex, she's spent a lifetime feeling broken, and the movie, this movie, is about how she begins to really find comfort and joy and a place of agency and power and also release and vulnerability, particularly around her orgasm. Let's say she just wants to come easier-- let's say she wants to be able to come with a lover the way she comes with herself. Let's say she wants to come all the way home into herself.

And so this song is playing, and I'm in the shower, and I've got the montage scene in my head. Don't these movies always have a montage? This is the montage from my movie: the woman's joyous face, big smile over and over, enraptured, head flung back, all thick with passion and screams -- in her bed, in a bath, in someone else's bed, in a park, maybe on a rooftop terrace, in the nighttime, in the day. We get to see her body's yes, the result of so many years of work (work? ok, yes, work.) We get to see the aftermath of her never giving up on the idea that she could have all the joy with her sex, that sex and coming could be a place much less fraught, less triggery, more open-bodied.

It was gorgeous, I'm telling you. Let's find the funding for that movie.

The movie-making did, however, distract me from The Actual Business I was meant to be down to there on my back in the shower, so I was glad when the song was over and I could focus again.

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I've been thinking a lot these days about what a romantic I am, and how I like a LOT of romance with my sex -- I got this concept from the Sex/Romance/Intimacy rap that we get at the SFSI sex educator training: this is a way to think about your ideal relationship style: do you like a lot of intimacy with your sex? or Romance with your sex? Or do you prefer your romance with intimacy but no sex? Here's a good breakdown of this rap, complete with Venn diagram, from asexy beast's blog. Check it out -- I have wanted a lot of romance with my sex, but have had a hard time letting the intimacy in -- that is, letting my erotic self fall all the way into the center of those three circles. That's some of my work now.

(You know SFSI, right? San Francisco Sex Information -- they have lovely things to say about sex in general, and women's orgasm and masturbation in particular)

So, here's what I've been thinking about, though: orgasm has mostly not been a place of romance for this body or psyche; keeping the romance out was another way to keep orgasm split away from the rest of my sex, I think. So orgasm, as a result of the fantasies that could carry me into it, was relatively brutal -- emotionally disconnected (the folks in the fantasy  were disconnected from one another, and also --because those fantasy-characters were always strangers to me, like I was watching a porn movie -- they were all disconnected from me), unromantic, power-over, hard, shameful. Now, some or any of those attributes could make for a pretty damn hot scene, I know, but mostly I just felt shitty about them.

In the stories I write, I could bring that hard/power-over/fucked-up alongside romantic/longing/vulnerable, and end up with characters getting what they want and ending up feeling pretty good about it, even if it was damn hard to get there. But that process took longer inside my own head.

Orgasm is a really fucking vulnerable place to be. Can I really welcome intimacy and romance there?

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Here's another thing I noticed this morning: the closer I get to coming, the more my head starts to reach for fantasy -- please, could we get out of being so damn close to the body, to this eruption, to this pooling explosion? Couldn't we just get a little distance? Sometimes the distance of a fantasy can give me some psychic friction -- how to explain this. But more, I think it's about safety.

So this morning, as all my muscles started to tighten, I let myself give in to a couple of fantasies (first that you were Out There, listening to me; next, that I got to watch you touching yourself -- you, then you. Yes. You, too, if that's all right, riding those hands hard and sharp and now), but over and over, I was back exactly in my body, feeling the panic that I might not get over the edge, that I'd have to ride this tension all day, that I wouldn't be able to Get There. Then the frantic waterspout eruption gathered hard and sharp in me and I felt everything sucked hard into my center, through my cunt and up out around -- what are the words for the sensation of a black hole in the body that brings only light and a terrifying joy?

Then panting, laughter, get up girl, get you to work.

So much more to say here, but I'll stop for now. Keep being good and tender to your body during this Do Something Lovely For Your Body Everyday Month (the long renaming of National Masturbation Month). Come again tomorrow, as it feels best for you. See you then.