Celibacy Sounds Great.

My life is a struggle of opposing forces. That sounds so dramatic. What I mean is that I am constantly living in the tension between conflicting impulses: between optimism and despair, between ecstasy and depression, between heat and cold. I mean that last one literally: it was 95 degrees yesterday and today it is 60.

But you could say that the temperatures apply to my personality just as easily. I'm a hot tamale or an ice princess and rarely anything in between. I promise: it is not as much as fun for me as you think it is. In fact, I know you have to deal with me through it all, but I still guarantee that I like it even less than you do. Serious.

But I do. I live in this world of diametrically opposed forces. This is the only way my brain knows how to construct a reasonable story of the world: by making things absolute. My happiness is the absolute epitomy of happiness, and my sadness sends me spiraling into mild-altering substances faster than most people can blink. I am not dysfunctional in the true meaning of the word; I function quite well in the world. But that doesn't mean that I'm not dysfunctional in the colloquial sense of the word, and really, I'm sure many people will be more than eager to attest to my dysfunctional behaviors if pressed.

For example, I have a habit of falling into bed with men without fully intending to do so. I may even have some sort of vague notion that ending up in bed would probably be detrimental. But it still happens. I can't help it. Or, they can't help it? I'm not sure.

Either way, it would seem that I cannot innocently climb into anyone's bed (even while decently clothed) without ending up an object of lust.

This upsets me, somewhat. Particularly when it causes a previously, dearly held opinion to be infinitesmally altered. There are so few people in general, and in particular so few personally known men, that I really look up to as instances of exemplary human behavior that having one knocked down a peg is a traumatic experience. I have (in my optimistic moments) an intense and unyielding desire to think the best of people, always. I have a yen to believe that human beings are wonderful and can be wonderful to each other, and can learn and behave with sensitivity and empathy when they are shown that they will not be eviscerated for doing so. In philosophical terms, I reject a Hobbesian vision of the world. Life is not "nasty, brutish and short." Life is beautiful, fantastic, long and filled with warmth and love. We can be people such as that.


But in other moments, I am firmly committed to this Hobbesian vision of the world, and I despair that I cannot see my clear of it. When one of my exemplars slips, it becomes ever harder to maintain the optimistic idea that we are all good people at root. Every time my heart is prodded and left to bleed, I lose some small measure of my ability to heal myself, to buck up, to readjust my vision so that I can again see the gloriously light-filled vistas of the human landscape instead of the long, dark shadows.

Every time I encounter indifference where my wildly optimistic soul dearly desired to encounter only love, I shed tears. Tears cannot be unshed; they have dripped now, for ever, from my soul and fell upon the world, and what happens when I can't cry anymore, and I'm all dead and dry inside?

These are things I worry about. How many disappointments can I stand? I face so many, every day, because of my great propensity for believing in the absolute best. Dr. Pangloss has nothing on me, but I fear that I can't maintain his spirit as well as Voltaire could. My Dr. Pangloss requires some small measure of vindication, some small sign that the best is real and possible, and when my best hopes for it are left in a bed that I never consciously desired to make for myself, what do I do?

More awareness would leave me bitter. Less awareness will leave me broken.

I live in the spaces between opposites. I live in the space, the ever-shortening space, between the Immovable Object and the Irresistable Force. I fold myself ever smaller to fit into these ideas of the world that I cannot shake away from my mind.

I still want to believe the best, desperately, but indifference makes it impossible. Still, indifference is not malevolence, and so I cannot believe the worst, either. I cannot believe anything. All I have left are hopes, so little understood, and hurts, so little attended to.