Coming back to old knowing

The first official non-NaMaMo post, here eleven days into the new month. I think I said, at the end of the last post, that I'd be back here tomorrow -- that I'd still be coming and posting. And it turns out that I was wrong: I needed a break after the intensity of the month; after thirty-one days of thinking about how I was going to write about my orgasm as I was coming, I needed some time to get out of that sort of meta-masturbatory headspace, and think again about coming just for me.

Too much interrogation of my sex, of how I'm doing it, of what I'm doing wrong and what I want to do better (too much allowing myself even to think in terms of wrong and better when it comes to sex!), and I begin to feel like I'm back home in Omaha in the house my stepfather built, and that's not at all the sort of coming home we're supposed to be talking about here on this blog. So I took gave my fingers some days off; in the shower, for the better part of a week, I just showered. I took the writing, this project of returning to the wholeness of my erotic embodiment, back offline -- and now I want to share with you some of what I wrote just this weekend:

Thirty minutes to write until the laundry is done. I read Eric Maisel while I eat breakfast: He says you must create from exactly where you are, in the middle of your everything -- keep writing. Drop everything. Make a schedule and keep it. There's no "getting away from it all" -- the only way to create is to figure out how to do it in the middle of your everything. (And isn't that true for these layers of recovery, too?) 

On Friday, I told my friend that I'm beginning to look around the edges of the lens of Incest, I'm beginning to wonder what exists of my sexuality not shaded or shaped by trauma. I tell her, Incest has been the lens through which I took in my entire life, and I thought I would be that way forever. Incest shaped everything, colored and bent everything; there was no pat of me not affected, not permanently altered.  

I saw the world through/as Incest, even before (could it be?) I saw the world through/as woman, through white/Caucasian, through middle-class: it was my assumption and breath, was my body and blood, my blink. The chalk taste that lined and limned the inside of my mouth, my tongue, the scrape that bit and bore at my shoulders. Incest was my base, by assured knowledge, the playing field, it's where I always started from -- always and first. How could there be any way around that? 

You understand about the kind of lenses I'm talking about, right? I'm talking about the way we look at the world, those experiences or identity that affect and shape how we see the world around us and that we expect to shape and affect how the world engages us; I'm talking about a constantly-worn pair of glasses, often that we don't even know (aren't expected to know) that we're wearing. Think about gender, sexuality, race, class, national or regional identity, ability, physical size, education, political belief system, friend network, community, experience of trauma -- we have so many lenses that, subtly or radically, alter how we view the world, how we experience our every day. Incest has been the lens I look through first, consistently. 

What I'm talking about is this: Incest has been my clapboard, it's been my house. It's been the sum total of my sexuality. Of course, that's not entirely fair -- but can I be honest? Incest has been the root reality of my sex, the place I come from. because I have so few memories of sexual experience prior to my stepfather's indoctrinations and abuse, I cradled sex and shame together (which, as an American woman, would have been my birthright anyway); I experienced my sex as entirely inflected by Incest -- the grace note that wouldn't go away, my entire sexual foundation, lodestone, education. 

I am beginning to ask, now, if that's actually true. I am beginning to question that lens, I am noticing that I have the ability to look around its edges, to view (and thereby engage) the world with a different valence. 

What does a lens do? Focuses. Colors. Textures. Opens or closes. Commutes. Centers or blurs. Shades or clarifies. It changes what and how we (can) see. What if this Incest lens isn't soldered around the insides of my eye sockets (like Molly Millions' mirror shades were)?
What if I can take them off? What if I can choose not to look at the world through Incest? 

I am not ready to remove my Incest glasses -- I am afraid of who I will be without that mantlepiece, without that wedge and megaphone. I can't quite imagine who I could be without them on. But I have a strong experience right now of peering around the edges into the body of my sex and finding brought colors there, new morning sun, finding heat and breeze, Finding my unincested body, a girl child with skin and nerves and bones, a girl child with hope and silence, with the fairy tale romanttic desire to be swept up and away, a girl child who played bondage games with a neighborhood friend -- who had a sexuality before Incest. One that preceded Incest. 

Ten years ago, I wrote: "Incest is the coffee I drink, all the air I breathe." 

Today I am inhaling this possibility: that might not be true. Incest is not the air I breathe, not the food I eat. It is a lens, an experience, a knowledge, it is a knowledge my body holds.  What if Incest is not the only way of knowing anymore?

I'm off to spend a bit more time with this body, fingering into what unIncested particles are percolating around under my skin. Be as easy with you as you can be. Come again, just as you are.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And further along in the book, she writes:

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

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

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

The hopeful part was this: if people are talking about such a thing as quality of presence, maybe it can be changed. Maybe I can learn to do it differently.
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I also became aware of how scared I was of just being present, which brings me back to coming, to being in my body. This year, I am being called to notice how I'm present in my body, and when I come --

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

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

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

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

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

Coming Home: Day 24 - all open-mouthed hunger

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

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

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

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

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

(right?)

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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?

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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.

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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 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.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

Coming Home: Day 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.

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

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

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

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

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

The wind, one brilliant day,

called to my soul with an odor of jasmine.

“In return for the odor of my jasmine,

I’d like all the odor of your roses.”

“I have no roses;

all the flowers in my garden are dead.”

“Well then, I'll take the withered petals

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

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

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

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

This is how it was for me this morning:

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

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

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

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

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

Coming Home: Day 14 - the bifurcations are refusing

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

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

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

10.10.2011

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

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

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

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

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


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

Coming Home: Day 11 - smelling my fingers

(bursty this morning)

Oh hi. Good morning. Here's me wobbly and shaky still in an Atlanta cafe for a quick blog post before I move into the work of the day, the play with my tremendous friends, the wedding planning and last-minuteness. Here's a thing I love about being in the south (if I can just make an uninformed generalization): folks here say hello on the street, acknowledge one another's existence -- even the joggers make eye contact and nod.

I suppose it could help to be a just-come giggler, wide open eyes, grinning at everyone.

You know how, sometimes, after you have sex with a girl, you walk around all day smelling your fingers, remembering? That's me this morning -- only the girl I had sex with was just me.

Here's what happened last night: I nestled under the covers, tucked into a nest of pillows surrounding me, I turned over on my belly, lifted my hips, notched my fingers under myself and breathed into exactly the fantasy I wanted, felt the rise begin. I breathed harder, moaned a little, turned my head to the other side -- and fell asleep. Woke up about eight hours later.

Oh.

Perfect.

Sometimes radical self care looks like not forcing it (haven't I said that before? Don't I have to remind myself over and over into this practice?), looks like long dreams, looks like the best way to gentle myself into a long rest.

(The music at this cafe is all 90s all the time and so now I have Annie Lennox flying into me, into my fingers, her birds singing the sweetest melody and me stroking the tired cheeks of the nineteen-year-old me there so many years ago in a cafe of her own, in a window seat, pen in hand, wanting the wings to fly away from exactly where she was, with no idea of where she would get to. No way to even begin to imagine this embodiment -- it would have blown her open with terror and urgency. Mary J Blige is telling me about searching for a real love, and I'm dancing hard with all the years and into this real love that's entered into the hands of my body...)

So, this morning, I sprawled out on the little hotel bed, slid my fingers back onto into over myself, did not pack the lube so I was back and forth between my lips and clit and mouth. I caught into new fantasies and old ones, I let them dovetail, I let myself use whatever caught as it caught. I remembered the slower build under my fingers. This was the first time I've come under my fingers since Hedgebrook (I think -- maybe even earlier than that), and I kept pausing to smell, taste -- just after I bleed my body is sweet, and I wanted to indulge.

(Here I'm about to move into some difficult remembering -- if you want to stay with the sweetness, just reread the previous paragraph a few times, and then go do something else with your morning. It's ok; perfect, actually.)

Here's the truth: for years I hated the smell of my own cunt -- because it evoked for me, exactly and only, my stepfather's face. When I smelled me, I smelled him, and so the very smell of my own fucking body was a trigger to me. Do you know what that's like? Do you know how fucked up that is? (I know some of you do, and sorry could not live harder in my mouth right now.)

I wanted to rid myself of the smell of my cunt so that I could rid myself of him. I didn't want to see my lover's faces after they went down on me, and it could be hard to let them kiss me when they rose back up off my body. Over the years, it got easier for me to smell and taste myself, and I got to the place where it was just once a month, one precise moment when the chemistry of my body was precisely whatever it was the day that trauma fused and twinned his face against the aroma of me, when that trigger first got traced hard like thorns through my neurons -- once a month, I couldn't stand how I smelled, and revulsion would pull me inside out. Just a couple of days a month. All things considered, that wasn't so bad.

This year, since the beginning of the year, I have loved my very aromas every single day. Every single day. When I became aware of this, all I could do was laugh in surprise. What happened? When I was in the shower, the water hot on me, of course, the whole room would infuse with the incense of me -- and at no point, on none of the days, was I seeing his face smeared with the damp horror of what he'd just been doing between my legs. Something had got uncoupled. Something had let loose. Something had come free, and I could delight, every morning, in the different way I smelled and tasted.

I can't tell you what happens, except for time and practice and fucking tenacity, maybe. I can tell you is that I'm grateful. This morning I forgot to say thank you, good morning, until the very end, until the after, until I flipped over onto my belly, panting, having sung my morning song into the quiet hotel air. And I haven't washed my hands enough yet to strip off the smell of me. Yes, this self-staining is an indulgence. And I'll take it as the earned balm and a layer of self-absolution.

Be easy with you today. Come as it's best for you, whatever that looks like, and I'll see you 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?
~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~
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
~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~
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.
~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~
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.
~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~
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 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.

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

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. 

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

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?

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

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!

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.

 ~~ ~~ ~~

 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.

 ~~ ~~ ~~

 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!