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 16 - getting caught up

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

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

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

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

By the Rivers

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

*

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

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

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

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

-Shirley Kaufman

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

At Bergen-Belsen. Bergen-Belsen.

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

Coming Home: Day 10 - the disassembly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coming Home: Day 5 - Unrepentant

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

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

That's not all I want to do.

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

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

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1.28.12

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coming Home: Day 2 - opening the throat

1.21.12 (from my journal)

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

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

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


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

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

Here's how. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

She also writes, in the section about making noise:

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

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


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