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 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.

Coming Home: Day 15 - (guest post!) Lighting a candle and keeping it real (Part 1)

Words today from my friend R_. He invites us to consider how we can use masturbation as a way to care for ourselves when we are depressed-- and how, too, that can be so terribly challenging (So much gratitude to you, R_, for these words, this writing, your practice.)

It’s so good to have someone like Jen in the world, isn’t it? Lighting a candle, putting on the music we love, and keeping it real for us. This space we create together invites us to go to places within ourselves that need us as much as we need them. In this comfortable place we can tell each other stories of how it is. And how it is, is not always how we want it to be.

Antonio Machado has a poem that begins to evoke how it is for me:

The wind, one brilliant day,

called to my soul with an odor of jasmine.

“In return for the odor of my jasmine,

I’d like all the odor of your roses.”

“I have no roses;

all the flowers in my garden are dead.”

“Well then, I'll take the withered petals

and the yellow leaves and the waters of the fountain.”

The wind left. And I wept. And I said to myself:

“What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?”

I inhabit a male body, and for the last five years I have struggled with masturbation. I am no longer able to find joy in it, and when I do come, I’m often left frustrated, sad, and ashamed. Occasionally, with the help of images and lots of time, I am able to approach my full strength, but I miss the unencumbered luxury of gathering urgency seeking release.

This is how it was for me this morning:

Stepping into the rain of hot water, I slide the curtain closed and feel the familiar desire to have a release before work. With eyes closed and the white noise of water driving against the back of my head, I consider time, desire, and ability…. and then take a generous helping of amber body wash into my hand and coat my penis in its cool viscousness, sliding down and around my scrotum, pulling gently … holding softly … taking comfort in its form and weight. Do I really want to do this? Bowing my forehead against the fiberglass wall, I conjure scenes with bodies while building sacred rhythms. My passion grows slightly, and I fill the palm of my hand, barely. It is not solid enough or strong enough to satisfy my hunger for a visceral experience of virility. I ask myself: Do I continue? Is some release better than none? If I continue, will I find any pleasure? I hopelessly try to relax, let the movie in my head––undulating hips, dark eyes, exposed collar bone––slow down, but under my fingertips I feel the elongating rope of ejaculate build under soft flesh, pushing its way toward the tip. Disheartened, semen drips down into the tub. Part of me vows never to masturbate again.

And where I go with this is pretty far down. Where I go with this is that I won’t be able to please my partner when I need to. Where I go with this is I stifle desire so that I won’t put myself in a position to have to test my ability. Where I go with this is that sometimes when I do feel aroused, I just wish it away. And having gone to these places, why not just close myself to desire? This far down, the garden is bare. I’m all withered petals, dry leaves, and empty fountain.

So what brought me to this place? There was a time several years ago when I was earning very little money and my partner was working extra jobs to handle the expenses. At that time, my ability to provide materially was tightly linked to my identity, and without it, well, I fell apart. Depression shows up differently for everyone, and for me, as part of this depression, I used masturbation to relieve the boredom. I masturbated to feel alive. Months passed, and while my depression eventually lifted, somewhere within the abyss I had lost the ability to fully please myself.

And hello National Masturbation Month! What a gift to have your support, to share this silent (no more) struggle, and perhaps rekindle my relationship with my desires, my sexuality, and myself. So where do I go from here? Seek professional help? More Journaling? Tantric exercises? I know that medication is not the answer for me. Behavior and conditioning probably got me to this place, and so behavior and conditioning can get me out, right? Or am I too naive? 

Is this familiar to you? What have you done to revitalize your garden?

Coming Home: Day 14 - the bifurcations are refusing

Still traveling, still exploring what embodiment means when I'm on the road and allowing new longings and textures and exhausts and sirens and aromas to touch my skin. Still walking my days with almost, with so close, with right there right there right there -- and letting them throb and hum through me continuously.

I'm doing a ton of writing in my notebook these days, deep journaling, the kind of writing that lets me both remember and discover who and where I'm living these days. When I don't have time for this kind of writing (and I haven't been having time for it), I start to feel fragmented, split, utterly untogether -- the writing practice allows me to bring all the pieces to the page of me. (Helps, then, too, in staying present when I'm sliding my fingers into the pages of me.)

I have something older to share today, something that describes the arc of my particular trajectory these seven months or so -- it's a write from a workshop last fall (the prompts were definitions of the words indigenous and occupy):

10.10.2011

I would like this frame back, this skeletal structure, these muscles and tendons, the jackboot padding that constructs itself across my shoulders and up my neck, down inside along neckbone, esophagus, larynx, feathering pins and needles    those iron bars    down into my back, the breadth of my ancestor center shut off and away from history because there's too much construction    the raw gnawing at belly, this wreckage of a shell, I meant the tension I inhabit    I want you off of me.    Uncolonize.    Deoccupy.

This isn't a thing to be made a metaphor of, no need to take the language of the resistance against the white forefathers and apply it like a balm to my skin, it doesn't soothe the iron anyway. What I want is your remove, what I want is your fingers off my beck, what I want is this body back in time and free, what I want is the possibility of safety tomorrow, which would mean I could relax today. It isn't yesterday I'm worries about, is it, shoulderblades? I'm worried about the promises he made for tomorrow, that any day he could be released, that any day he could be at my door, that any day I could be unsaved, proven wrong: oh look, you thought you were free. Fooled you. People say the parole board would have to contact me. People have too much faith in the parole board. Is it that I still trust him more than anything or anyone else, the promises he whispered into ears that couldn't close tight enough, couldn't keep him out, his promise of always, anywhere, find you. Did he say that? How to walk into this life with the tight rope existing within my own skin?

Breathe into now and don't look over your shoulder. You have to choose just one direction in which to point your eyes; commit to it. But I was the girlchild who sat only half-way in her chair at the breakfast table, hair uncombed, jeans dirty, sneakers half-tied, anxious already to be off and running   how to choose only one now, only this moment, how to choose to breathe into that armor that boulders my shoulderblades and makes muscle untouchable? How to tell it: you can let go now. How to believe, after eighteen years, how to believe it's ok to let go now? How to say I want back what I have never had had: serenity in this body, the profound privilege of safety, of getting to sit peaceful in one 's own skin, not preparing already, tightening up into the fact that he could step through prison walls and into my living room. This is that kind of love song, the vigilance of the body for its violator, the thrumming of the broken and left behind for that which wrecked it.

And so now, this month, these days, relinquishing (in steps almost too small for me even to feel) that allegiance to trauma, to his hands and promises, to the ways he shaped the conditions of possibility for my very being. How could it be any wonder that I am living in a state of cognitive dissonance? How could it be any wonder that my lines feel blurry? They are crumbling. These bifurcations are re(-)fusing and I am wobbly in my shoes and I am still walking forward into a future that looks altogether too brand new for me to even believe.

And yes, more orgasms to come. Tomorrow a guest post from a good friend R_, who is tangling with self-love/masturbation as (potentially) radical self care around depression -- hard wrangling, and good and gorgeous writing. I can't wait to share his words with you.


Be easy with you. Come as you can, as you are -- and see you here tomorrow.