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.

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

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.

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

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 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.


~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~
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.

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

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.

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

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?

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

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.
~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~

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 17 - being present with that ceremony

I'm home alone and it's late, almost sixteen hours since my orgasm this morning, the one that tore through and up into me and brought me heaving, heavy, against the porcelain, into that cry-laughter that's become the place I live.

After coming, I rushed to work, dove into projects and last-minute crises, then had a workshop to gather and prepare for; the day filled itself, and all through it, even when I was all Alexander-and-the-no-good-very-bad-day there around suppertime, I had this throb, this openness, this place of laughter in me. Something still speaking. Still singing, maybe. Still open-mouthed. Still hungry.

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

I asked a friend what happens in her body when she comes -- and where it happens, and how long it persists. Of course the answer varies, depending on the sort of orgasm, depending on the day. What happens in your body when you come? I was thinking, when I asked her, how the orgasms that push through me when I'm using a vibrator are different from the ones my fingers call forth, are different still from the sort of implosion that the water has been bringing me. But in all cases, now, what's true for me is that the sensation fills my whole body -- centers, sure, in cunt and belly and upper thighs and womb and lower back -- but as it coalesces and then erupts, I get to feel it everywhere: head and toes, forearms, shoulders, face, lungs, calves, mouth, throat, and then beyond, too, into that space that my me-ness occupies that exists not exactly within the bounds of my skin.

And then there's this radiating aftershock that lives in me as heat, that opens out slow and persistent, that comes along with me into my day; I both rush to get dressed and ready to go to work, and am moving slow and measured, unhurried, something in me languid and luxuriant. I grin into the morning concrete, the grey-pantsed people, the BART co-travellers. We are all so lucky, I think, to inhabit these bodies, to get to be with them all the time. Sometimes there are small, bright contractions, hard inside or fluttery within the body of my clit. Where do these come from? Something in me is still dancing.

This is entirely different from how I used to feel, back in college, when I masturbated to orgasm -- both before I was out from under my stepfather's control and after (he continued to abuse me until I was 21). My orgasms then -- the ones I had alone; I'm just focusing on those now, though the ones I my stepfather demanded were similar, if more exposed  -- were always vibrator-and-fantasy-centered. I would be under the covers of my small bed, the lights off, the music loud, maybe I'd be half dressed. Maybe it would be afternoon, which was the sickest time of day for me to get off, because it always brought me into the frame of mind of after school, which was when my stepfather was often home and waiting for us.

I want to be able to explain this to you. The thing that I learned how to do, because of my stepfather's actions, was a kind of kinesthetic calisthenics: while trying to come, I could disconnect my actual bodily sensation from the sex that was occurring in my fantasy -- this is not strictly possible, but to the best of my ability, I brought the sensations that happened to or on my body up through me into the bodies of whomever I was fantasizing about, touching none of the rest of me as I did so.

How do our psyches learn/understand how to care for us in these ways?

I wanted as little of me involved in orgasm as possible. When I came, hard and sharp and fast, the orgasm was almost entirely localized in my cunt, in grabby contractions; then there would be the aftershock-y sort of waves, and these spread nausea through me. I got up fast, pulled up my underwear, shoved the vibrator back into sock drawer or bedside table, rid my visual space of all evidence of orgasm, and tried to relinquish from my muscles any sensation of coming. I had a feeling of accomplishment -- I did it -- but no persisting relief, and absolutely no joy. At that time, I felt both compelled to come and repelled by the experience. I hated coming and very much believed that I was supposed to do it.

So what to say about these intervening years, when--through my own need and longing, through the help of lovers, through the shared experience of friends, through therapy and time and so much writing--I have come to a place where orgasm can more fully ride through me, can ricochet open my throat, can pearl hard between my legs and shove me into surprise at its build, can bring me to breathlessness, to sobbing, to delighted laughter, even when I am alone with my hands on myself? What to say about that kind of healing? How to find a word bigger than heal to describe what feels like miracle, this sensation in/of body that I never would have considered possible to imagine? What to say about this wondering that percolates in me know: I wonder if this sensation could get bigger, if I could feel these orgasms more?

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

This morning I was urgent, a little insistent, and my body asked me to wait -- we had a couple of steps up today: build then plateau, build again then another steady plane of pleasure, then that sharp uplift. Today, there in the shower with Pandora serenading the steam and me and my hips rocking under the pulsing flow, my head was almost entirely void of fantasy -- just the terror of just being in my own body, with its hungers, and how I got to be present with that ceremony. Twenty minutes, I think, or fewer -- quick, maybe. Just right. What a thing it will be to go back through these posts at the end of the month, to look at the rise and fall of my mood and emotions, what has felt quick and what has felt endless, to trace the cycle of my month of desire.

Be easy with you in this dreamtime. I'll see you again in the morning, should you choose to come. 

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.

Coming Home: Day 10 - the disassembly

Today I'm feeling freaked out about this whole project, ready to let it go, let it fly, set it down at the back of the table with all the rest of my unfinished loveliness: that manuscript, that couple of story collections, those poems, all of it. Go read someone else's book. Other people have done this work, they've figured it out, why do I have to do it again?
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I am crying because I want this so badly -- I am scared of all this wanting. I am broken open and I chase my orgasms all over the country of my body; I want to find them and feed them to you but I am so fucking terrified. Like what? Like I could get over him, over it, like finally my body could be mine again, or just for once, like the thick swell of pleasure could only sift through my own fingers like I could deserve this can it -- my chest feels like it will erupt, split apart, fissure and burst with the weight of what I want to hold, to let in, to release
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I haven't come yet today -- it's 9pm in Atlanta, and I am tired and hopeful and sad and split open and grateful and scared.

Today, this morning, early, I tried and tried to come, to let go, to find what would work, and then finally I gave up. I cried on the plane -- I just get so fucking sad because I know my body is capable of different kinds of orgasms (that means: orgasms I don't have to actively drive with my hand/will/vibrator/etc -- orgasms in dreams or under a mouth, say) and what am I so afraid of, what's the lashing that unhooks in my brain and singsongs me somewhere else, takes me away from just what I'm doing to some grocery list or workshop I need to plan for --

or -- and here's the worst part -- my brain just gets so focused on what someone else (let's just imagine there might be a someone else, because 1) this is what I'm sad about today and 2) masturbation happens in all kinds of configurations, not just when we're alone-alone) is doing that I can't concentrate on coming.

That doesn't even make sense. Can you parse that sentence, that idea? My body can, unfortunately.

This morning it was the vibrator for an hour, try to get there, work it hard, numbing me completely. On a day like today, a vibrator on my clit (or my fingers there, or maybe even the water -- or someone else's hands or mouth pressed fast and slick, let's just pretend) is just not enough.

Yes, it's true, sometimes it just doesn't work (for other people, too, Jen: not just you), but today I hate that. Today I want to be better / different / well / healed / fixed / changed / Other. I want to work. I don't want to be broken. I don't want to feel broken. I don't want to be so fucking obsessed about this.
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What would it look like not to be in charge of my orgasm -- if no one was in charge of it? If I let it have its own life? I wallow in the tears for a minute and then want to go dancing at a blues club, want to be dim lights live band smokey wearing a thin dress with a short, loose skirt.  I want to learn this story new.
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Why can't I be a nice normal porno girl with a hair-trigger clit that creams easy like really, just careens into orgasm at just the right moment -- ok, maybe hands get used sometimes but couldn't I come too just with a mouth, rocking against a body. Couldn't I have a little of what those other women have?

This is my grass-is-always-greener moment, my sour grapes my self pity piss green apple bottle swollen cheeked sad survivor girl if I can come when my fucking stepfather has his goddamn mouth on me then why can't I come with easy with my fingers or when someone I actually like and want to have sex with has their fucking mouth on me? Why is this disconnect fair?

Yes, ok, psyche, I honor your protection of ourself -- but can't we turn it off now? Can't we have that probability back, that set theory, those amalga, that venn diagram with me in one circle, my hands in an overlapping circle, the idea (or the reality) of your body in a third circle that overlaps the first two, and in that big curvy center triangle described by the intersection of the three circles/sets = my fucking multiple orgasms.

I wouldn't even bother trying again today if it weren't for this blog -- and so I have mixed feelings about the whole project today. I don't want to be obsessed with my orgasm; I just want it to happen. I don't want to have to go after it. I'd like to be surprised by it -- regularly, I'd like to be surprised that at its eruption. What would that be like?

Today I'm just sad.  Let the sad in. I'm sad about a lifetime of consensual sex that's been pretty damn good, actually, and yet always too with that distance, the orgasm anxiety, the wax paper worry of what about me will I get to come will I get there how frustrated will I get this time -- will I finish up with coming, how long will it take, how far away will I have to go inside my head to get enough distance from the intimacy / danger / terror / longing / this person I adore to be able to actually come? 

What would it look like to rip off that overlay? Actually, I think that's part of the issue now -- or just today: this deepened ability I have now to be present with what's happening to my body means it's hard to escape / dissociate into fantasy, means I have to do the work now of re-associating orgasm with exactly my body's sensations. We haven't done this before, me and this body. We're dancing a new dance now. Some days the steps won't work the way I want them to. We have to practice more. I can sing this metaphor all the way into tomorrow. Here's me heading back to my fingers, because I said 31 orgasms in 31 days and I'll be damned if I give up now.

(be easy with you. come if you want. see you tomorrow.)

Coming Home: Day 7 - what if I stopped apologizing to/for myself?

2.26.12 (dd)

What are the words that are falling away: the slick shame of apology, I mean apologizing for what lives inside my heart. Shame. Shame. This is the thing I want to give up for Lent, the hollow hoarding of misery just to wear it like a fur coat on my tongue, just so that I cannot fully enunciate, just so I can’t quite speak. Give me this, mother. Hold out your two choir hands and let me drop there this years-long bath of shame, this unguent tenacity, this bilge of broken bones, this dishonest levelour, this underskin. I have been wearing shame like it was my own name for so many years that I am not quite sure who to be without it, am altogether too naked, feel uncloaked even if what I really mean is washed clean. Clean has not been my name; I’m the girl who climbed into dirty and made a home, swept out one corner and brought in my books and a blanket. This is what I want to tell you – shame has been the armor, sure, wet and creaky though it was, wholly eroticized, consecrated, entangled with my every vein. I thought it was my own heartbeat – but I was wrong, wasn’t I? What does it mean, now, to be without that slick skin?

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It's mid morning and today's orgasm came pretty quick and hard; last night was a sleepy buzzing, I think I may very well have dozed through my actual coming I was so goddamn tired. But there I was in my nest, all sparkly in the aftermath of the Femmes Go Dirty South event, ricocheted through with all of those women, their voices, the articulated and claimed desire, the saying precisely what we want from our bodies, from our lovers, from our communities -- asking questions, naming truths, fucking shit up. Virgie read a piece with so much clarity about how she comes (from an instruction manual for new lovers, phenomenal) that I almost wanted to cry: yes yes yes. Look at her not apologizing at all: doing the opposite, in fact.

Where has it come from, this sense that I have to apologize for how I come, how I like to come, that my orgasms are less than because they happen mostly under my own fingers or vibrator (or--yes, can I say it over and over again -- in the shower)? Does it matter at this point that I've spent years basically apologizing for being a survivor -- look, I'm sorry that I'm broken in this way. I still really like sex, though, and if you can just help me come now and then, if you can just put up with how I come until I'm fixed / whole / healed  and able to come different / hotter / better / more normally, then we'll be all right.

But I do come normally. I want to come in other ways, too, sure -- but these ways that I get to orgasm are normal. What would happen if I stopped obsessing about coming different and just let that be?

I'm speaking to the part in me that still feels broken, feels the direct link between the way that I can come the most easiluy/consistently when I'm with a lover and the fact that I first learned how to come in this particular way when my stepfather was raping me. How do you hold that link? How do you let it go? How do you fully claim a part of your sexuality that came to you through rape?

What if I stopped apologizing inside me, stopped saying: sorry, body, that we came at all during those years that we learned this skill, that we took this pleasure from him even as he tried to kill everything else in us -- what if I stopped demanding that the teenage girl inside me apologize for what she did to stay alive? 

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I want something hotter, sexier, cuter today -- but this shit isn't cute today. I was worked up this morning, got in the shower and was barely wetted down before I was on my back in the tub. Ready. Please. I dropped hard into a fantasy about actually getting to make use of one of those bathrooms at the Center for Sex and Culture last night -- maybe we were on break, maybe people were starting to settle back into their seats and it was starting to get quiet and you wanted me to be loud when I came, you wanted me to let them all know where I was and what I was doing.

And so I did.

I thought about how much I like to be in that place just before coming, when everything in me is swollen and sensitive and close, when I am so close. I can live in "so close" for hours, ride it, make myself crazy. Then there was that acknowledging whisper in me: yes, we're going over the edge -- and I grinned, remembered to say thank you to my goddamn body, kept the water spray exactly where it was, imagined everyone in that place last night being able to hear me as I yelped and shouted and begged and Yes!ed.

Oh, that was hot, my friends. I'm still a little wobbly.

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This is all there is today: too much to do, more I want to say. Last night I got to meet Shiloh McCabe (of The Sex Positive Photo Project) who, last year, spent the month of may documenting the images and stories of folks who masturbate -- it's devastatingly hot! I can't wait to read all the stories.

I'm grateful to all of the women I got to read with last night, everyone in the audience, all the folks who name the truth about their desire and share that with others -- with lovers, with friends, with strangers. I can't tell you how much gets freed in me every time I hear another story that normalizes the way I come and all the different ways that we come. I need those stories. I need to share mine with you.


Be easy with you and your body. Thanks for reading -- come again tomorrow!

Coming Home: Day 5 - Unrepentant

Some days it's gonna be harder than others to get up and get to the blog -- that doesn't mean the coming isn't happening, though.

I don't want to be inside today, don't want to be at the computer -- I want to be outside, running, soaking up big sun into this thinned skin. 

That's not all I want to do.

Take this body to the beach, to the mountains, to the desert, to the high grasses around the cottonwoods along the Platte River. Take this body to the cornfields, to the dust of Route 66, take this body to a single lane road and a convertible with the top down, take this body to high cliffs over a pounding ocean. Take this body home. Let it / me / us understand how exactly home we have already come. 

This is about joy today, about all the different ways we can lift off and sing, about flying grounded and opening hot into the morning.

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1.28.12

I want to  write the story of my masturbation – or how I grew to ignore stranger’s stories and learned to love my fingers – how the release, when I can get there, opens my shoulders and hands, the back of my throat and how, when I’m just fucking myself, I’m not worried about what anyone else is thinking—if I’m doing it right, if they are, no—it’s just me and my vibrator or my other vibrator or my other vibrator or the showerhead or my own tender fingers luxuriating in all this body and too many unfulfilled fantasies. It’s just me loving the breasts that he was the first one to put his mouth on, the belly that he was the first one to touch, the ass that he first cupped in his hands during the backrubs  that he dissuaded my mother from worrying about. I want to tell you the long history of me and masturbation, how I never did it as a child except vague rockings, now and again, against tight underwear, seams of jeans or bedclothes. 

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What was the shame that kept me from pressing my hands into the ions of myself, those nights I slept alone? Why, when I was exploring everything else in my world, didn't I explore this skin, that heat and pleasure between my legs?

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Because almost there, that phrase, those words, rivet themselves from my lips every time I masturbate (every time I have any sort of sex at all), the poem below is playing for me. 

Today I think I lived in those words for a month: oh god, don't stop, I'm almost there, almost there, almost there.

After this morning, the count goes up by two, maybe more. Am I keeping count somewhere? Maybe we could track the different kinds of orgasms -- the laughing hard, the tearing up, the different eruptions that lift from my body. Those all count, don't they? Then there're the explosions -- those are the ones everyone can recognize. I'm learning to watch the other sorts of orgasms; like learning to listen to the quieter voices that live inside my fingers and belly.

Almost There Timothy Liu
Hard to imagine gettinganywhere near another semi-nude encounter down this concreteslab of interstate, the two of usall thumbs—
white-throated swifts mating mid-flightinstead of buckets ofcrispy wings thrown downhoi polloi—an army of mouths
eager to feedleft without any lasting sustenance.Best get down on all fours.Ease our noses pastrear-end collisions wrapped around
guardrails shaking loose their boltswhile unseen choirs jacked onairwaves go on preachingloud and clear to every last pair of unrepentant ears—

Unrepentant ears. That's all I am today. That, and unrepentant mouth, unrepentant fingers, unrepentant hunger. I'm taking all this shamelessness out into the world now. Maybe I'll see you out there.

Be easy with you and your body. Thanks for reading -- come again tomorrow!

Coming Home: Day 2 - opening the throat

1.21.12 (from my journal)

Expose this old wound, this hot hound of anger, all this ache that has fitted itself to gnaw at what I imagined we would be when I thought I had the stamina to fold myself for you forever. Expose all the lost girls in me, the ones who didn’t fit, boot-wearing drama queens, the unnice, let the mean girls put their mouths around the back of my throat – I am tired of being a clammy handed yesterday, yes slipping too weary from all of my wrong lips, these wounds are picked too hard and my planting hands have been itchy for years-- I could put a spade into the wrong part of your planter but really what I think this trowel is meant for is my own back forty.

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my dictionary says orgasm comes from the Greek word orgasmos, to grow ripe, be lustful; and probably is akin to the Sanskrit ūrjā: sap, strength.  (My copy of Roget's has nothing between the entries for organize and orgy; we can have orgy, I guess, because it's so often used synonymously-- is that what makes it safe?) 

The online etymology dictionary says (in part), of the word, masturbate: The long-standing speculation is that this Latin word is altered (probably by influence of turbare "to stir up") from *manstuprare, from manu, ablative of manus "hand" + stuprare "defile" (oneself), from stuprum "defilement, dishonor," related to stupere "to be stunned, stupefied." 


to grow ripe. strength. stunned. hold these words today; let them frame a new possibility.

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This morning I wake up early and can barely move -- was up until after midnight dealing with the psychic blast zone I became after a particularly difficult conversation with my mother. How can I masturbate after that? I think, wanting nothing more than to stay under the covers and nestle in deeper to the warm covers and quiet. Sophie was still sleeping; no one wanted anything from me. Couldn't I just sleep? How could I get up, journal, come, then blog?

Here's how. 

Today I did it the new way, me in my shower, back bent against the porcelain, shower head switched to massage and held between my legs, the water hot as I can stand it. I say, Good morning, body. This is for us today. I say, thank you. I float into the conversation with my mother, then pull myself back. That was last night, that was another moment, that is not what I'm here for now. Now I'm in the bliss of your mouth (the water is so much easier to make into a mouth than the vibrator -- a new development for my fantasy life), maybe we're at a fancy bathroom at a fancy party and you shift aside my long skirt to find stockings, garter belt -- and nothing else. Then you are asking me to sing, and I moan into the white quiet of my bathroom. I get loud, breathe hard, cry out, oh my god oh my god oh my god. This is a new way, too.

The water pounds hard onto me, harder now that I no longer allow the tub to fill while I am masturbating; that's how I did it in high school. I'd be so long in the water that my whole body would prune, and I'd have to empty the tub down once or twice, so as to avoid drenching the kitchen with overspill -- that's how long it took me to come. (Feel the perforative there. Don't consider what a tremendous piece of self-care it was for me even to soak in a bath for an hour or so, to allow any self-given pleasure during those years of trauma. This is where reframing begins.)

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I'm a bit frantic today, and my heart pounds hard behind my fingers. There's rage roaming around in my ribcage, and coming doesn't settle that ire: just feeds the other parts of me that need tending to, and maybe even offers some sweetness to that long-held-down animal of my anger, some oxygen, a little breathing room.

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These are the pieces I want to offer today, that I want to explore more over this month: 

• Today I came relatively quick, which means in about twenty minutes; often I will take half an hour, even sometimes closer to an hour, when the watcher that lives just outside my brain won't let us pitch over the edge into coming. Quick often feels better to me, more normal -- I want to take apart these words, want to unhook fast from good--and slow from bad! --want to love my orgasms exactly as they come to me.
• And here's the other thing: I want to be able to come faster. I want to be able to come different. I want more kinds of orgasms ready in my repertoire. I want to come hard and slow sometimes, and fast and light other times (or even fast and hard. Could I sometimes come fast and hard?) I have had other kinds of orgasms in my life, unmediated by my own fingers (or vibrator, or shower head) even (although one of those was when my stepfather was in the middle of an assault, and so I wonder if it's one I should even count, except for this: I understood, in that moment, that my body had this capacity, that I could come that way, even if I didn't want to be doing so with him. This was important information for me to tuck away inside of me.) I've also come during dreams, and woken up mid-contraction. This means my body can do it: and I want to know how to allow those different kinds of orgasms all the way into my sex.
• Today there were tears living just behind the small laugh that pushed out of me after I came; they didn't pour out of me, though that's happened after I come (both with a partner and alone), and I was a little disappointed not to feel that additional release, too.

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In the Survivors Guide to Sex, Staci Hanes gives some great tips about how to masturbate, especially for those of us who didn't start masturbating until later, sometimes not even until after our experiences of trauma were over. One of the pieces that she tells us is to breathe: "When you breathe and relax your body while you masturbate, you are communicating something new to your body-- that it is safe to feel sexually turned on, that it is fine to get off and to enjoy pleasure. Relaxation communicates safety to your body on a very deep level. (pp 93-94.) 

She also writes, in the section about making noise:

Groaning and moaning is good for you! Your voice is an integral part of your sexuality and your pleasure. Opening your throat and making noise helps keep your body open and relaxed. it keeps you breathing. If you are concerned about roommates or neighbors listening in, soundproof your room as best you can. Play music. A towel at the base of the door can help to absorb sound. Masturbating in the shower can give you the privacy to use your voice freely.
(pp. 94, emphasis mine. ahem.)

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Now I'm off into my day, off to a staff meeting, off to notice how the swell of this early morning coming continues to open, yes, to unfurl in me -- and how it will curl around and into the anger freed beneath my skin, what songs they will sing to each other.


Be easy with you and your body today. Thanks for reading -- come again tomorrow!