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 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 18 - can orgasms be romantic?

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

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

What if the movie gets to be your real life?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coming Home: Day 17 - being present with that ceremony

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coming Home: Day 14 - the bifurcations are refusing

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

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

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

10.10.2011

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

2.26.12 (dd)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so I did.

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

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

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

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


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

Coming Home: Day 4 - particularly blessed

 A poem for today, to begin with.

(Thanks to my dear friend, the divine Miss M, who sent this one to me today just at the exact moment I was about to start hunting for it... :)







'This is for every man who licks'

This is for every man who licks
his shoulder during solitary sex,
rubs his beard against the stripey
deltoid muscle or bites himself hard.

This is for the woman who at the body's
buffet touches her breasts one at a
time then reaches for the place
she has made as clean as Mother's kitchen.

Masturbation should be as exciting as any
heavy date: have a drink first, lay out
some poppers, open that favorite book
to the most shameful passage because
without blessed shame nothing is
as much fun.

And please don't jump up afterwards
and rush for the washcloth like all
the relatives were on the porch
knocking, their hands hot from
casseroles and a cake with God's
name on it.

Rather lie there, catch your breath,
turn to yourself and kiss all the nimble
fingers, especially the one that has
been you-know-where, kiss the palms
with their mortal etchings and finally
kiss the backs of each hand as if
the Pope had just said that you are
particularly blessed. 

 - Ron Koertge

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Today, I did, in fact, jump up afterwards and rushed not for the washcloth but for the towel -- not out of shame but because I was about to be late to meet my friend for coffee. Could I explain to her about my shaking hands, the flush across my cheeks, the grin that lives in my belly these days? (Turns out I could, but that came later, after squatting down on BART to scrawl in my notebook, to write out a draft of this post, after rushing down Market St with the words (just the words, mind you) still staining my fingers.)

This morning flowed like most of my mornings have for the better part of this year: 

• wake before the light
• make tea and write my morning pages
• take Sophie out for her walk, then prepare both her breakfast and my meals for the day
• get in the shower for the daily ablutions (it's fun how anything can become a euphemism)
• dress and get out of the house as fast as possible so I can make it to work not too late.    

This morning I almost didn't even try. Coming has been hard and taken a long time recently--

(these words, these damn words -- hard, long time -- perfect in some erotic contexts but never right for woman's orgasm. Sometimes I hate how many times I read P. Califia's "Taste of Vanilla," how I've internalized that sense of being too much work, no matter the fact that none of my lovers have ever once complained. It's all about what lives inside. Guess who did complain that I took too long. Guess. Right -- and stepfather-rapists shouldn't get to complain that their stepchildren are taking too long to achieve orgasm during their sexual assaults, should they? Isn't that the epitome of adding insult to injury?

We're going to get to the language part. Promise.It's time for some rethinking/transformation there.)

--and it was already just about 7 when I got in the shower, and I was supposed to meet my friend at 8. In the city. Did it make sense even to drop down to the porcelain after my quick shampoo and wash, to taunt myself open, just to have to leave all throbby and unfinished? 

~~ ~~ ~~

Here's a fun tidbit I just found on the Men's Health site, from an article called 10 lessons about the female orgasm:

Oh, and studies show that it takes 15 to 40 minutes for the average woman to reach orgasm. Going somewhere? 

(Ok, yes, Men's Health. And, you're right, there's the dreaded "studies show" -- we would like to know which studies, wouldn't we? But still: 15-40 minutes for the average woman to reach orgasm -- and I've been feeling like a bizarre outlier in the world of girl bodies and coming? Why have I never thought to look up this detail before? Why didn't I pay more attention in SFSI training?)

So, then, what the hell is this 'too long' business about, anyway?

~~ ~~ ~~

This morning, I managed to be out the door by 7:30, throbby, yes, and having come -- having come, almost certainly, in under ten minutes. Something moved fast and together for me today, surprising me; something in me was ready. A reward, maybe, for having actually written what I needed to write (morning pages that were emotional, complicated, connected), who knows. 

The fantasy today was one of the under-pressure ones: we're in a bathroom at a club or a party or a closet or a classroom (I know) or some other situation where someone might walk in on us soon, or there's another appointment in a few minutes or someone's looking for you or someone else has to pee so we need to get out of the goddamn bathroom and you're not going to quit whatever it is you're doing to me until I come, so either I better come fast or else get ready to get watched by others while I do come. Sometimes I come fast, hard, laughing -- sometimes it takes a bit longer and I get to have those strangers watching. Either way it's hot -- and it worked.

~~ ~~ ~~

Yesterday I was sure I was only going to come slow this month (or, let's rephrase that, mid-average) -- around 30 minutes most days -- and then today I had that stretch of certainty that I wouldn't be able to come at all. 

So now I'm being invited to be less and less certain, and am feeling grateful for how my body works, for how it surprises me when I just ask for what I want -- even from my own self! How about that for some radical self care on a Friday morning?

What's your body story for today? What are the ways you are allowing yourself to be particularly blessed?

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