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 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. 


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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 16 - getting caught up

Ok-- back home, and I'm getting caught up. Two orgasms in five hours (just hush up if that sounds slow/easy for you -- it's a big deal for this girl here) -- one I got to go to sleep after, one complete with sobs.

This morning, now, I feel full and raw, wide open, stripped, visible, vulnerable -- and just right.

On legs like those of a newborn foal. You know that kind of wet and shaking, the newly borne thing just learning to bear its own weight? That's where I'm living these days.

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Found a wonderful anthology just the other day, called This Art: Poems About Poetry (Michael Wiegers, ed; Copper Canyon Press), which includes this:

By the Rivers

That spring he was fourteen,
sun on the walls, stale air
sweet in Bergen-Belsen for the first time,
he told me he thought of the nurse
who held him when he was small.
He found a corner
where they did not catch him:
rush of the brilliance and the heat
and no one there. He opened his clothes,
hunched over his wasted body,
and made it spill.

*

The poem wants to look forward, not
back, but out there as far as it can see
are ruins: body of Abel body of god body
of smoke. And no recognizable
child to mourn.

So it begins with longing.
Or with fear, that old dog
stinking beside it, scabby and blind.

And all the time the future
is pushing up uncalled for
under the cold ground, or gliding down
like the first snow, wet syllables
that melt and soak up the darkness.

The poem wants to get out of
where it is. But is instructed
to remember. In shameless daylight.
By the rivers of salt.

-Shirley Kaufman

I read this last night on an airplane, one that lifted off from the East Coast after 10pm and carried me forward through the night back toward home. Look at those lines: He opened his clothes, /hunched over his wasted body, / and made it spill. 

At Bergen-Belsen. Bergen-Belsen.

That's not radical self-care. That's something entirely beyond. Maybe just simply and perfectly human.

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This is what I wrote in my notebook, the day I found that book of poems:

I worried last night that I am too obsessed with sex, that I have made it my whole life, that trauma has inflected me this deeply. But then why is that a thing to worry about? People obsess over all kinds of things, whatever they love: why do we have to shove an interest in sex into a box called pathology? I worry what people will think: is this all disgusting? Am I saying too much?

(Too much again -- of course. Too much. What girl isn't too much? What longing? What desire?)


I'm stressed right now about the blog, about my writing and orgasms, feel strange and difficult in my body. Maybe because I'm not writing about everything, just this one thread of my life, the part where I'm trying to/wanting to come every day for a month and write about what that does for me, but not sharing all the other aspects of myself-ing to which this process is tethered and tugging. Still more bifurcation, still more distinctions between real life and pretend/fantasy -- here's maybe this cognitive dissonance: the bifurcations, the separations, don't really hold these days. It's not a fantasy me who wrote these things down and shared them with the world -- it's the real me. My exact real me. All my muscles are tense, something in me doesn't want to let go the armor that has protected me, these splits, these different selves: holding unreleased orgasm, holding the full on feel of release, holding spent screams, holding the possibility of really letting me have me. 


I want to learn new places, read the strange books, feed my words into the world, this promise, this oddity, this chemistry, this compromise, this practice. 

Did I say at the beginning I was getting caught up? That's exactly right -- when my head goes spinning, I get caught up in the panic, the worries, the explanations, the analysis, the I need to figure it all out. That, my friends, is from a lifetime with parents who want you to understand and describe your feelings (but don't always want you to have those feelings), then an adolescence with a man who wants to yank your feelings out by their roots and use them entirely against your emerging, just-budded body. It's easy for me to get locked --especially when I have only my fingers on myself (no other chemistry, no other technology, no loud distracting buzzing, no hot heavy thud of water)--into a cycle of panic: why is this taking so long? When will I ever work right?

This, then, is the practice (how many times will I write this exact phrase this month? Far fewer times than I'll repeat it to myself): come back come back come back to this body right now, and understand that you get to have everything that you want, body, and we get to be perfect in exactly our responses in this (any) moment. This is not a contradiction, even and especially when what I want is to come fast and what my body is doing is lingering for some long minutes in the pleasure of the plateau, the longing, the long slow burn and build.

Today I wept for that practice, for the release, for the wanting more and how I have to/get to keep learning that my body knows its infinite possibility -- and that when I quit trying to force it/us/myself to come/feel/respond in a particular way, so much more joy and release can open up in me. Contract, then release. Then release. Then release.

Thank you, body. Thanks, too, to your bodies, out there. Be easy, and come as you wish. See you tomorrow.

Day 1: May 1 - striking bone

(day 1, orgasm 1 -- who's keeping count?)

 I just had an excellent little half-hour of sweaty sex, tumbly and moaning under my covers. And I was all alone. This is a bone-deep bedrock of my sexuality, a place of radical self care, and I'm claiming it for all to hear.

 I woke up at 6, the light was coming up outside the window, I rolled over in this new bed in my new apartment in this newly reframed life, put on a favorite podcast (we love whodat), nestled into the nest I make of all my pillows, and grabbed for my good (good vibes, thankyouverymuch) g-spot vibrator (which I have maybe never actually used on my g-spot) (and which is purple like everything else in my bedroom, because I am trying to have the gayest bedroom in Oakland these days), and said, Good morning, body, Thank you. Here we go.

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 In one of my favorite books about writing, Elizabeth Benedict says:

As sexual activities go, in literature as in life, masturbation has its limitations. And although we may agree, at least sotto voce, that it is the primary sexual activity of mankind, there is no getting around the fact that you usually do it when you don't have any better offers. When you are alone (read: lonely; read: abandoned) or when you feel you might as well be. the plain truth is that it doesn't do anything to help your social life. Alas, it is often a reminder that you don't have one or that there's something missing from the one you have. (The Joy of Writing Sex, pp 189)

I think it goes without saying that I could not disagree more, and I'm here, with this blog project, to come out as a masturbate-a-fan, as a cheerleader for self pleasuring. I want us to undo this terrible, damaging narrative: that masturbation indicates, by virtue of its very happening, a failure, on the part of the masturbator, to get some better offers, to have any sort of social life to speak of. When we capitulate to this narrative, we do a violence to ourselves, and we relinquish the pleasure and knowledge we receive whenever we lay our hands on our own bodies and deliver delight.

For folks who have survived trauma (and when it comes to erotic wellness, there are so few of us in the US or other parts of the world who make it through with our psyches unscathed), masturbation is a way to learn the true contours of what someone else has turned into a battleground; it's a way to bring life back to a deathscape, a way to retrace, with kindness or fear, the very scene of the crime. It's a way to learn what kind of touch we like, and how we like it. It's a way even, as in my case, to take back the exact touches, imaginings and convulsings that were forced upon me (I mean take the way my stepfather trained my hands to move on my own body and bring the orgasm he required before he would stop harming me for that morning/afternoon/evening/phone call) and let them, over almost twenty years now, blossom into new meaning and new possibility.

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 My body took a little bit to wake up this morning, my head took awhile to settle into what we were meant to be focusing on: not how late this masturbation was beginning (how could I possibly imagine to put masturbation on a schedule?), not this blog and how I wanted to describe everything to you, not what all else needed to happen today/this week/this weekend/this month... come back down, I'd say to my racing brain; be right here right here right here, and I'd feel around with the tip of the vibrator, pushing against clit, inside just swelling lips, yes, I'm telling you this, and what I mean to say is that slowly I settled into what was actually happening: me loving my own body to orgasm first thing on a Tuesday morning, letting all my muscles tense and loosen, letting the moans escape from my own lips, imagining you letting me wake you with my lips between your legs, giving myself a little fantasy to jump and sing around the sensations between my legs.

I did it the old way this morning: under the covers (pulled up to my chest), with a vibrator and the music loud around me. This was the way I came for years, the music loud to (somehow, I imagined) mask the vibrations, and I could escape all the way into fantasy, I could move hard into the imagining of some faceless woman getting fucked by any number of faceless guys, I didn't really have to be part of the equation at all. You understand, right? This was about survival -- this was about being able to give myself the small thread of pleasure/trauma re-enactment of orgasm; for years and years it was always both: pleasure and then the nausea that followed immediately in orgasm's wake.

This morning I wanted to do everything while I was masturbating: I wanted to be dancing (the music doesn't help with that), I wanted to be writing down exactly all that was happening, I wanted to forget everything and just fall into sensation. I took deep breaths, shoved a little into that fantasy--I nudged between fantasy and the exactness of my experience: these days, my orgasm doesn't come so easy if I try to ignore what I'm doing, if I think I'm going to disappear into fantasy. These days, I'm actually having fantasies that I appear in, that people I adore appear in, that are based in my known and consensual reality, which is a Brand New Thing. These days, my body wants me aware, only wants to come when I am feeling it, when I am in my body.


When I am in my body. Do I have to explain what a big deal this is? That's precisely the why of this project. I'll spend the next month explaining what a big deal this is.

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This blog project is not going to be a place of simple, unqualified celebration, because I understand that masturbation can be used to damaging effect as well, have spent years when I only felt like shit after I got myself off, used fantasies that made me feel like a monster after I came -- and understand, too, that sometimes even the best orgasm leaves us wanting something more. Loving ourselves now can't change what happened before. But it can change the landscape now, it can alter our every day. This morning, a couple hours now after coming, I still feel a little throbby, still feel my shoulder and back muscles relaxed, still swell inside with that release of pleasure. The morning orgasm alters how I enter into my day.

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I got sweaty under the sheets and comforter this morning, and filled my empty apartment with my own moans. The puppy woke up and tried to get my attention at about 6:30; this is the problem with coming in bed instead of the shower -- not being a fan of baths, she tends not to interrupt me in there, no matter how much noise I'm making.

This morning, after I came, I did what I always do these days: I laughed, giggly and low, delighted. I felt how turned on I was, how I could easily have continued, maybe carried myself on and through to another orgasm -- I don't even feel around anymore for the nausea, for that old horror, for the place in me that carried my stepfather's smile and scent on the contractions my cunt took while coming.

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I often stop touching myself (alone) when I am in a long-term relationship, and then I find some part of my sexual self has shut down, begins to disassemble, because I have turned away from what has been a fundamental part of both my healing and my sexuality: getting myself off is one of the most consistent self-care practices I've actually been able to engage in over these years of trauma aftermath. But I buy into the narrative that Benedict articulates above: someone else is supposed to be the one who gives me orgasms, and if I can't let them bring me off, there's something wrong with me. If I give myself orgasms, I'm taking something away from my partners, I think; so I stop. And then I get angry and disappointed, because I'm missing that part of my sex. And so I start in with the furtive orgasms, spreading out on the floor of the bathroom, on the dirty bathmat, or in the bathroom at work (you may sense a theme at work here) -- trying to come fast (a feat), keeping quiet (not difficult until recently), coming into a place of both joy and guilt, because why? No one else is supposed to know that I'm stealing this orgasm from my lovers' fingers. Please know that no lover has ever communicated this to me; it's my own internalization of society's beliefs about coming home into our own bodies, coming into our own hands or vibrators or shower heads or pillows or stuffed animals or jeans' seams or wherever/however else we come.

We get to know our own bodies. We get to hold our own orgasms between our teeth, and love them.

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This is the challenge I've set for myself this months: thirty days, thirty (at least!) orgasms, thirty maturation/orgasm-centric blog posts. It's National Masturbation Month: you can come home into your own hands, too! Please share your orgasm and masturbation stories with us -- we get so much permission for our own particularities when we learn about one another's practices and experiences; I mean, it becomes more ok that I come in the ways I come when I learn that other people come in all different ways, too! And if you enter into your own daily-orgasm practice for this month, will you post here now and again, letting us know how it's going, what effect it's having on your life?

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