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 31 -- getting curious about radical self love

Today's the last day of National Masturbation Month -- how have these thirty-one days of radical self love treated you? Have you come every day, or loved on yourself most days, or thought more frequently about how your body likes to be tended to? How have you marked National Masturbation Month -- and what are you carrying forward with you? What will you leave here in May?

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For me, self-acceptance is the notion that I am not fundamentally wrong because of my history or physical body. It’s the realization that I am fundamentally right because I am neither my history nor my body. It’s the choice to recognize my humanity just as I recognize and respect the humanity of others. And, sadly, in our culture and in our time, accepting ourselves is really radical. It’s not common. It’s not expected. And, yet, it can be the greatest difference maker in moving forward gracefully in doing the work we are meant to be doing in this world.

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2011/03/08/2122252/what-is-radical-self-acceptance.html#storylink=cpy

- Rosie Molinary, author of Beautiful You

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2011/03/08/2122252/what-is-radical-self-acceptance.html#storylink=cpy

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I'm thinking about radical self care, radical self love, and radical self acceptance -- these are all intertwined, don't you think?

I'm both excited and disappointed that it's May 31; I have been consumed by this daily project, which perhaps has not been the best for my own personal orgasm. It's easy for me to get obsessive, especially about how I'm doing sexually (and by doing, I mean recovering/healing): Are we all better yet? Are we fixed? Can we stop worrying now?


I learned well how to focus overmuch attention on the how of my sex, whether I was doing it right, whether or not (mostly not) I was coming, and why, and what I should be doing about it. I had to spend a lot of my adolescence in those sorts of conversations, whether overtly or covertly. This particular layer of my obsession with sex was fed to me, and I learned to breathe it in order to survive.

Obsession isn't the same as curiosity. What I've found this month is that I am happier and so much more functional when I can be curious about my sex, my desire, my orgasm rather than obsessed about these.

Curiosity, I think, is a feature of radical self love/care/acceptance. What happens when I get curious about this aspect of myself, meet it with love and interest, rather than with knives and hammers and microscopes, ready to study it away, ready to slam it into a new shape?

Here's an interesting definition I found just now:

obsess - haunt like a ghost; pursue;

Haunt like a ghost. Right. Exactly. When I am obsessed, particularly around my healing or my sexuality, I get into a rigid, numb place. It's hard to breathe easily. I want to be fixed now. I take on the characteristics of my old, scared self -- that girl who had to actively interrogate her body just in order to get through the night. I don't have to inhabit that ghost anymore. I can choose to meet this body with different lenses, different stories, different possibility.

I feel like this month of orgasms has invited me into a new relationship with my body, has invited me to consider my blocks and struggles, the places where I'm selfish and the places where I'm generous, where I'm still terrified and overwhelmed, where I'm still armored, where I ride shame, how much I need laughter with my sex, how I release and where I hold tight -- and has invited me to consider every breath a practice. Even coming, particularly for trauma survivors, can be a place of meditation and centering.

This month I got to tell people, over and over, about this project, that I was writing about masturbation and healing, trauma aftermath and radical self care, and got to push more deeply into the shame I hold about the very work that I feel has chosen me, and that I choose every day. For ten years, I have waited for people to tell me that I should be ashamed of myself for doing this work, for talking about powerful sexual desire and sexual trauma in the same breath, in the same workshops, in the same piece of writing (as though their disapproval would mean I had to stop!). But when I talk to people about the work, I am consistently met with encouragement, enthusiasm, curiosity, new ideas and subjects to consider, even tears: we all of us need more spaces to talk about the complexity of our desire and our relationships with our bodies, not fewer. And so, as I move into the end of this first part of the Coming Home project, I am so deeply grateful to get to engage in these conversations, to think critically about the ways we talk about healing in our different communities, to get to revitalize my own relationship with orgasm while doing the other thing I love most in the world: writing.

So thank you for being with me during this month. I look forward to more challenge, questions, laughter and wonder to come.

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Coming Home doesn't stop on this 31 May 2012. I'll be here again tomorrow, June 1, and we're going to be moving within the next week to our own domain, and will continue this curiosity-centered engagement with healing from trauma through (and sometimes against) radical self love and exactly the sorts of orgasms we want. Stay tuned, ok?

Be curious and adoring of your body today -- just exactly as much as you can be. Come again tomorrow. See you then.

Coming Home: Day 30 -- my body is more than a crime scene

I'm not hiding my love anymore...

(2008)

where her body ought to be  

She wants to put her body where her words are, fully into the flavor of sex, stunned with the liquid of meaning and possibility, and the most hostile vulnerability.

This is the skin I settle into, the girl behind the screen, the safely ensconced in pixels or pencils / and yes, writing is an embodying affair / it sloshes your stones with hopes / it asks your nerves to show up for the aching / but I can forget how to breathe today / and I would almost always rather write than fuck / because behind the skin of my page, I can just be that free woman / the one with no safety torn and scabbed beneath her nails / the one whose triggers are taxidermied and mounted on the wall for all to see / they are quiet behind glass when I am writing and cannot startle or snare anybody — not there. When I am writing, my triggers become works of art / almost admirable / almost:

See, that one looks like her sister’s face cluttered over with fallen feathers, the plucked body of a girlchild / and / that one is a diorama of her high school, cardboard cutouts of her graduating class cluttering the forefront, the teenagers’ faces all stained a kind of rakish purple that meant they had eaten the fruit of tomorrow and lived / (Her face is stained only an off-shore eggshell white with what she had to swallow, and there is no tomorrow for her in that picture) / in this one, the boys are all backhanded, they each have a piece of her virginity poking out of their ragged back pockets, though the full flesh of it lives at her house, in her parents’ room / (there’s its carapace, over in the far corner) / there are diagrams — this one here, and that one — of the ceilings she shut her eyes to, and then studied and tried to find shapes within

All these pieces so containable when I write / when I write sex / I can shut the door to this exhibition / leave it for the curator and night staff to tend to its reedy exhalations and stains of saliva / when I’m writing sex, I don’t feel them on my body / I put words where my / body / ought to be able to be

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Today I'm strong in that place of shame, which is shaped around an exhilaration so big that my body doesn't at all know how to hold it. Do we really get to be in love with our bodies? Do we really get to bring joy to all those places that were -- and here I freeze. Were what? Were shat upon and sliced, were called beautiful and desirable by the people who were meant to protect us (I learned to hate being called beautiful), the places in us that were feasted upon?

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In Sex for One: The Art of Self-Loving (that manifesto to the power of masturbation!) Betty Dodson writes:

Masturbation is a primary form of sexual expression. It's not just for kids or for those in-between lovers or for old people who end up alone. Masturbation is the ongoing love affair that each of us has with ourselves throughout our lifetime. 

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The ongoing love affair we have with ourselves throughout our lifetime.

There's a lot I didn't accomplish this month with this blog-project: I wanted to totally alter my relationship to orgasm, free it up (in 31 days!) so I could come exactly how I want, whenever I want. Ok, so maybe that process is still ongoing. Maybe the effects of a month of orgasms is still unfurling in me. Stay tuned -- Coming Home isn't going away after May 31.

This is what I realized the other day, however: that through the course of this month, I have stopped thinking of my body as a crime scene, as aftermath, as a place that ought to have police tape around it. My body is more than the trauma that my stepfather inflicted. My body and psyche are not simply duct-taped battle wounds.

There are scars in here, but more than that -- there's delight. There's forty years of curiosity and exploration. There's this lifetime of reaching out, wanting my skin on the grass, against trees, putting everything in my mouth just to see what it feels like there. There're hugs and tastes and orgasm and sleep and waking and walking in rain and pushing muscles against stone and loving animals and planting seeds and slicing garlic and reading everything my eyes came across and writing late into the night, early into the sunlight, there's candlelight and bubblegum and learning and riding my bike down the tall hills and the smell of jasmine and rosemary and ocean spray and Polaroid cameras and tears and movies and rage in my muscles like ice water and so much laughter that my face will forever be marked with it.

What I'm telling you is, my body-love is larger than my trauma.

Do I have to find the words to express both my joy about this, and the deep reaction from the old voices, the ones that want to keep me/us in the place of simply scrambling to survive?

Thus the walking around in shame and celebration. I'm doing a lot of deep breathing, and listening to the numbness and terror, listening to the old songs, telling those overly-protective parts of myself that they have done an excellent job for these twenty years, and that I am finding them a pasture to live out the rest of their days.

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So yes, today I will continue this love affair with myself. Here's something else Dr. Betty writes: "We need to see sex as an advanced form of moving meditation that grounds in our bodies by getting us out of our self-conscious mind that is constantly chattering away. Practice is always beneficial." 

Yes. Practice. Let's get a conversation with Dr. Betty here onto the Coming Home site, shall we? A woman who's spent the better part of her life advocating for the power and necessity of masturbation (for all of us) will have something to say about healing from trauma and reclaiming our big body-joy.

Be as sweet to you as you can be today. Come exactly as you are. See you again tomorrow.

Coming Home: Day 28 -- when is it too late?

Today I want much more than my hands on myself, than the water between my legs, than some simple contractions. Today I want the soar of connection, of hands touching, of love in and through a body that didn't expect to do any more, ever, than just survive.

Today I am slippery in all the poems, I am drinking tea and not eating enough, the tears are all stain and open throat, the quiet is broken by the sad songs, the puppy I let myself love is curled into a small groaning ball. Today I am preparing for what has always been my vocation. Today I want to slip out from under the writer/watcher, the part that analyzes and is already crafting description of my every lived moment -- I want to breathe into an unwritten moment. I am writing now, will come later, and I will not tell you about it. Today's orgasm will be just for me. 

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Didn't we have to include this one during this month's ode to the love and struggle of masturbation?

The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator

ANNE SEXTON

The end of the affair is always death.   

She’s my workshop. Slippery eye,   

out of the tribe of myself my breath   

finds you gone. I horrify

those who stand by. I am fed.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

Finger to finger, now she’s mine.   

She’s not too far. She’s my encounter.   

I beat her like a bell. I recline

in the bower where you used to mount her.   

You borrowed me on the flowered spread.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

Take for instance this night, my love,   

that every single couple puts together   

with a joint overturning, beneath, above,   

the abundant two on sponge and feather,   

kneeling and pushing, head to head.   

At night alone, I marry the bed.

I break out of my body this way,   

an annoying miracle. Could I   

put the dream market on display?   

I am spread out. I crucify.

My little plum is what you said.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

Then my black-eyed rival came.

The lady of water, rising on the beach,   

a piano at her fingertips, shame   

on her lips and a flute’s speech.

And I was the knock-kneed broom instead.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

She took you the way a woman takes   

a bargain dress off the rack

and I broke the way a stone breaks.

I give back your books and fishing tack.   

Today’s paper says that you are wed.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

The boys and girls are one tonight.

They unbutton blouses. They unzip flies.   

They take off shoes. They turn off the light.   

The glimmering creatures are full of lies.

They are eating each other. They are overfed.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

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What does it look like to let go of hyper-vigilance, to release the energy that has been focused for twenty years on looking back over all my inside shoulders? What does it look like to have all of this one self present in this one moment, no fragments floating off to keep watch for any interlopers, any threat? What could it possibly mean that I am beginning to imagine such an embodiment, that, in my moments of meditation, I can feel the tremendous relief in my muscles, that I weep (it feels that heavy) with the ability to let my shoulders fall into right here, right now? 

What does it mean to know that I will still get hurt, whether or not I am hyper vigilant, whether or not I was on the lookout for the next assault, whether or not I thought I was protecting myself? What does it mean to breathe into that assurance, let it be just true: not a tragedy, just a human fact?

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I'm all questions and huge hope today, and I think this isn't so hot -- last night I dreamed about the Masturbate-a-thon: I logged in to the site just in time to see a gorgeous friend of mine saying, calling to Carol, that she'd just come. She had her clothes mostly on, a red dress to offset her pale skin and blonde hair, she'd been on her back and had her hands under the dress, the dress was wrinkled where it'd been pushed up around her hips. But when I get to the video stream, she's already pulled the dress back down, her face red and grinning, already re-composing into her public-performance persona. Later in the dream, I got to the Center for Sex and Culture just after the event was over. The room was filled with the energy of the just released, a few stains on the floor (the room was carpeted and in some industrial building, nowhere that the CSC has ever actually been housed during the years I've known about it.) I was disappointed to have worked up the courage to come out for the event and then have missed it, was a little electrified. I helped Carol and Robert with the last of the cleaning up -- 

What can I say about this dream? This line was in a poem I wrote in response to this weekend: too late to find / comfort enough in such small daily moments -- and I wrote, over and over, is it too late for me? I'm forty years old -- is it too late for this embodiment, this understanding and acceptance, this joy, this still-mourning. Is it too late to expect that I will wake up happy tomorrow morning, that my dreams can come so true that I will finally need new ones? Is it too late to take hold of my own hands and bless them? Is it too late to wake up?

I know -- it's a ridiculous question. We can say, reflexively, that it's never too late.


 And yet -- to feel it. To feel it.

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Come again tomorrow, ok? Only and always as you like it. See you then.

Coming Home: Day 26 -- the levels of reclamation

I'd love to tell you how it feels. 

When it's riding you out to the sky, and your whole body is huddled in a point, and then it rockets away from you on waves. I guess something about the ocean says it best. The smell. The origin there. Conceived and then burst into a billion cells. I mean we have all been intimate with the deepest creative experience: we've all been born. 

I think people who are lost, that's what they're most let from. And sex. Well that is one of the simplest and most thrilling ways to get it back again. 

- Summer Brenner, from "Let Me Tell You How It Feels," in The Erotic Impulse: Honoring the Sensual Self (David Steinberg, ed.)

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This morning was quick-ish, riding hard on the water and images not from a book, not from my own imagining, but a story you told me.

A story you told me... do you remember?

Do you know what that means?

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Twenty years ago, in 1992, I was a college sophomore in New Hampshire. I lived in a single room in a small dorm, right down the road from the co-ed fraternity where I would come out later that summer, maybe in a month or less. Twenty years ago this month, I still was a straight girl, dating a musician who also lived in my dorm. He had been to my home in Omaha, had met the abuser I called stepfather, did not understand why I cried so much, did not understand why I broke up with him and then begged him to come back to me. He wrote melancholy songs. Twenty years ago, the only "sexual" stories that got whispered to me, I mean the only fantasies offered directly into my ears when I was supposed to be getting off to them, were given by my stepfather, over the phone, during calls he made during breaks between his patients, or when he was home alone. (How do I use the word give, like it was a generosity, a kindness? I use the words of my experience -- the violence was like that. Tender. Acquiesced to, ostensibly requested.)

It was my stepfather who first encouraged me to write about sex, but that came a year later.

When I went away to school, the way he continued to hold on to his control was via the tether of the phone. He kept me on the phone for hours, interrogating me about whatever psychological issue he'd decided I was suffering from and needed processing, conversations my sister and mother often also had to be present for, all of them sitting around the speaker phone down in the basement office or in the living room, me wrapping the white, twenty-foot cord around my arm, while I sat on my straight-backed wooden desk chair, looking out at the small clearing between my building and the Shabazz house.

And then, when my mother and sister were not present, he called and used a different voice. He wanted to come for me, or wanted me to come for him. And he already knew, didn't he already know, that I would be able to actually come for him -- even over that distance, even from 1500 miles away, even without his body directly presenting its threat, he knew I wouldn't fake it. I was that adapted to his control. I was that interested in being worthy of escape, worthy of release. I believed him when he said that eventually he would stop and let me go (it would be another year and a half before I understood that he would never let me go willingly, that I would have to chew through the meat of my family and step out, clean bone, empty, orphaned, ready to be taken down for the audacity of wanting to determine my own body's trajectory).

He gave me his fantasies, pushed them at me, wanted them to make me come. I learned to close my ears; the only way I could come during these instances of violence were when I shut out all external input -- which, of course, was only mostly possible: still the words of vaguely non-consensual-but-ultimately-desired sex with minors, still the feeling of the vibrator on me, still the sound of his breath. I would shove into my own fantasy, get away from what he was doing in my ears -- and the times that he came, alone, he called "quickies," and it was my job to pretend like those turned me on.

I learned to hate the phone. I did not share my true fantasies. When I asked for those of others, I mostly wanted the power of knowing something intimate about them. I certainly never wanted anyone to talk to me over the phone about their fantasies while I fucked myself. It almost never happened.

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Twenty years ago I looked into a future that had no shape, and sex rode the place of distance -- masturbation was both an attempt to give myself a little pleasure, and a pure rehearsal of trauma. Twenty years ago, I had no certainty about not getting away, because I could not see a future for myself at all.

Today I am stretching a ghost hand back to that girl, offering her a bold promise of embodiment. Today I am promising her it gets better, even though first it will get much much worse. Today I am holding her hand the way she, in a month and a half, will hold the hand of another woman during sex with a  group of friends, the way that she, later, will hold the hand of a family member. Today I am cupping her sallow cheeks in my two hands: It isn't just about getting free, Jen -- it's much much more than either of us could imagine. It's about finally getting to fill out the long breadth of our skin. It's about getting to tell the truth about what we want and pursue it. It's about getting to welcome the sound of someone else's desires and not being held captive or manipulated by those. It's about home, Jen. You will get home. It will be harder than anything you can imagine now. But you will get home. And home will be this body that you are so desperate to escape from.


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If it feels right, let the sun on your body today, in your eyes, let the sun caress the soft skin of the ones still living on the insides of your bones, the ones in you that you protect by your very existence. Come just as you are. See you again 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 23 -- dissociating (to) orgasm

Today I have the sick that was percolating in me yesterday -- and somehow, in spite of the fact that I felt physically worse when I woke up today than I did yesterday, I felt like coming this morning. I dedicated my orgasm to wellness -- let's hope it takes.


(I got that idea of dedicating orgasms from our hero Annie Sprinkle, who does all number of fabulousness around orgasms and wellness and world health.) 


Anyway, right now it's later, I've got my tissues, my stuffy nose, my tea and saltines, and am still going to blog about orgasms. Let's hear it for the glamorously sexy life of a sex blogger.


~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~
This morning, as I settled in under the water, I was thinking about dissociation and masturbation (how's that for meta?) -- the truth is, I don't always fantasize about sex when I'm masturbating; in fact, when I first get started, I think about almost anything but sex: plans for the day, how sweet it was to play w Sophie out in the park, what I new to add to the shopping list, what I'm going to write here. After learning to fully dissociate while also experiencing extreme clitoral stimulation (as with a vibrator), I know how to both feel the pound of the water against me and keep it at a distance -- it's quite possible for me to have a vibrator on my clit for an hour or more and not be any closer to actually coming than when I started, if I don't really pay attention. I have to focus, as with a kind of meditation, if I want to be in the rise to orgasm.

Did you ever hear that joke with the punch line, 'Beige. I think I'll paint the ceiling beige.' In my memory, it's a blonde getting fucked who doesn't know enough to pay attention to what's happening to her. I went and looked it up -- it's actually a three part joke: what's the difference between having sex with a prostitute, your mistress, and your wife? The prostitute asks you, "Aren't you done yet?" Your mistress asks you, "Oh, honey, can't we do it again?" and your wife says, "Beige -- I think I'll paint the ceiling beige."


Now, I think I heard that joke back in college. The only bit that persisted for me was the punchline, because it sounded exactly like something I might think during sex -- not because I wasn't interested in the person I was having sex with, not because I wasn't turned on or didn't want to be there, but because it was just so easy to float away, and it was hard work having to be so present all the time. Sex, for me, is an active clause -- even sex by myself. 


It's somewhat embarrassing to find myself thinking, "Beige..." when I have my hands on my own clit, and I'll admit that I start wondering about my own technique, but the truth is that it's just trauma aftermath, and I give myself a break. 


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

I have two orgasm stories to tell you, related to this business of dissociation & focusing in:

1) This morning, I laughed at myself when I found that I was planning out a blog about dissociation while I was trying to come for that same blog. Just too many layers of recursivity there. So I took a breath, brought my awareness back in to my body, and had that thought about dedicating my orgasm to my wellness, to the wellness of us all. Then, I'll tell you, I came pretty fast, in spite of my body aches and the fact that it was a bit hard to breathe. I'm still on these exposure/exhibitionism fantasies, which are working.


2) One night at Hedgebrook, I found my head wandering when I was well into masturbating, and getting toward that place in my rise when I'm going to actually pitch over into coming. I kept the vibrator on me, moving it just slightly, while I began to imagine (totally unintentionally) my new apartment (which I hadn't moved into yet): I could see the cozy living room, darkness from the bedroom and office and hallway; there was a pot of soup simmering on the stove, and the windows were steaming -- outside it was dark, stormy, and the sounds of rain pounded all around. I saw my pup, curled up on a pillow in the living room, sleeping and comfortable and relaxed. And then I saw myself, in the bedroom, on top of the covers, masturbating -- Outside of the fantasy, in my little double bed in the cabin at Hedgebrook, I had this thought: We're going to be all right. It's going to be ok. And then I came hard, crying and laughing at the same time, to an image of myself safe and good in a new life.

That is (yes, here I go, spelling it out), sometimes we can use exactly the skills that were meant to take us away from sex to bring us in, by the back door if need be. We use it all.

Frankly, I consider that latter orgasm to be profound visioning work.

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

I'm about to settle into an evening with Law and Order and some soup, hopefully an early-to-bed. Sometimes radical self care looks like an orgasm for the sick girl; sometimes masturbation looks like curling up with a blanket and Emergen-C. I'm grateful for this space, for you there with your eyes, for the space to push into these layers around self-love and longing.

See you tomorrow. Take your vitamins, ok? Come just as you are.

Coming Home: Day 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.

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

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?

~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~
 
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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coming Home: Day 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 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?
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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.)