I bought myself a plane ticket to Spain for my birthday. I leave tomorrow. I intend to spend the dawn of my 28th year on earth in misty mountain solitude, listening to medieval chants and wandering around the oldest still-functioning monastery in Europe.
After that, I'm going to Barcelona to party.
I am refusing to take a suitcase on this trip (not such a strange thing, for me) but I am also resistant to even taking a backpacking pack. It's too big. I'm packing a duffel bag for this trip, the kind of bag one takes on a long weekend. A "weekender," the fashion people would call it. It's fake red leather, and my mother spotted it on the free table at Value Village Thrift Store two months ago and brought it home for me. It has no rips and no holes and the strap is still attached and the stitches are firm and the zipper works, so I'm not sure why it was on the free table, but it has a good home, now. This is a bag I will love.
I have my little duffel loaded up with clothes: underwear, cardigans, a cocktail dress. A toiletry bag. A current converter. I'll add a pair of fancy flats later tonight.
I have a backpack, too, a carry on, the backpack that has been on every single trip I've taken since I was fourteen and went to Oceania for three weeks. This backpack has been around the world. It's been to Australia and New Zealand, it's been to Spain before, it was with me when I got stranded in Morocco, it's been to Paris and seen the Mona Lisa, and it's held water and sandwiches while I hiked in the Schwarzwald. It's met my daughter's father. It's climbed Mayan ruins on the Yucatan, seen waterfalls in the Andes, gone to street parties outside of Santo Domingo. This backpack has been to New York City more times than I can count, seen the redwoods of Big Basin State Park in California, wandered around downtown Detroit. It's been to St. Louis and Indianapolis.
Into this backpack I will put my camera bag, laden with camera and lenses and lens filters and cleaning cloths and memory cards and a battery charger and a card reader. I will put my tiny pink computer, and its charger. I'll put my phone and its charger. I'll put in two books and a wallet and a passport and three packs of American Spirit cigarettes, in the yellow box, and a lighter. The lighter will also be yellow.
I've had butterflies in my stomach for days now, anticipating this trip. My insides are quivering in anticipation of being unattached for seven entire, glorious days. My wanderlust is ferocious, voracious, and stems primarily from a desire to have no attachments at all. My daydreams are always about taking off into the sunset and leaving everything behind. My fondest, most impossible wish is to start over, completely, from scratch. I want to disappear with my duffel and my backpack and never come back, never look back, reinvent everything about myself.
I can't do that. Having babies really puts a damper on your ability to disappear without a trace. Well, unless you're my baby's father.
(Heh.)
So, I take the next best thing: Whenever I can, I go somehwere alone. Like tomorrow.
I have many vices. Cigarettes, coffee, alcohol, pretty dresses, vintage hats, ridiculous high-heeled shoes, loud music, driving too fast. Some of these are probably even full-blown addictions. But of all my vices, and all my addictions, this is most certainly the worst. This is the one that could cause me to abandon everything, hit rock bottom, sever every tie. It would be so easy since the addiction is to rootlessness, restlessness, the ability to move on whenever the urge hits, to put one's life in two small bags and go, onward, forward, sideways, backwards, it doesn't matter as long as you're moving.
The addiction, you see, is to this fluttery feeling I get before stepping off into the unknown. I am addicted to the rush of adrenaline and the limitless vistas of possibility. This feeling is better than any drug, than any drink, than any touch. This feeling is better than any love. This combination of knowing everything theoretically and nothing concretely and being able to see everything and nothing all at once is better than anything else you can name. I would chase this feeling endlessly if I could. I would step off every cliff, climb every mountain, turn down every blind alley to find it again.
If I could. If only I could.
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
There Is Nothing Wrong With Sex
Social networks make political commentary ubiquitous, so when I see things my friends say, sometimes I laugh and sometimes I cringe and sometimes I do both. A comment like, "This from a climate-change denier who thinks the world is 6,000 years old and that making contraception available encourages sex" will elicit both a giggle and a cringe. I mean, it's funny because it's so ridiculous, but that last line makes my head hurt. The lover in me immediately read that last bit, "making contraception available encourages sex" and went "WHOA, there, buddy! It doesn't matter if making contraception available does or does not encourage sex, because there's nothing wrong with sex."
And when I put that out there into the public sphere of the internet, I got this reply: "Might want to include 'consensual' and 'between adults.' " And my first reaction was something like, "Well, duh. Obviously." And I was just about to make some polite reply about a 140 character limit and all that noise, when I stopped. Because you know what?
Duh. Obviously.
"Non-consensual sex" is not a thing that exists, world. Non-consensual sex is RAPE. And rape is not sex. When did sex, as a word or an idea or an act, become so tainted that it has to be minutely distinguished from rape in public discourse? Is sex so dirty, so awful, and so much of a violation that it is inherently indistinguishable from rape? No. And it is both disturbing and deeply saddening to come to the realization that a lot of people might feel it so.
Sex is not bad. Sex is beautiful. There is nothing wrong with sex.
While I do think that at least some fear of sex stems from a deep-seated misogyny (you should read some of the things that Bukowski and Warhol had to say about sex and women, golly geez) I don't think it's a universal explanation. The woman that told me I ought to add "consensual and between adults" to my exhortation that there is nothing wrong with sex, for example: I don't think she hates women.
Rather, I think there's a strange modern conflation of love and sex, and also love and marriage, that ends up creating a bizarre triangle in which the points are love, sex, and marriage and everything becomes a tangled mess.
To wit, physical intimacy and emotional intimacy do go hand-in-hand. And it's not a purely female thing, as so many want to claim. Yes, women form attachments when they sleep with someone. So do men. Men are, in fact, capable of rich emotional lives. Sex is better, for both parties, when there's love involved, and trust, and respect. Anais Nin said, "Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy." And she was right.
Sex is often seen as proof of love, which is where things begin to become murky. "Nobody dies from lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from." (Margaret Atwood) Feeling unloved really does feel an awful lot like dying, and because the connection between love and sex is so deeply instilled, the urge to go out and have a lot of sex to stave off that death, that desperation, that utter loneliness can be strong. Nothing in modern culture has captured the absolute soullessness of using sex as a bandaid like Steve McQueen's Shame. I was horrified to read reviews of that film talking about "normal human sexuality" and "unsexiness." The thing that makes Shame such a powerful film is that it is not about normal human sexuality, or sexiness, and yet its protaganist is still a sympathetic and poignant character. McQueen and Michael Fassbender together have created a space in which behavior that be would be considered depravity and degeneration in less capable hands is instead merely tragic. The moral judgment against sex itself is removed, and the obvious distress of the character is the moral grounding of the narrative.
Like everything else in the emotional landscape of a human being, there are greys and gradations in sex. If sex within love is ecstasy, and sex by self-destructive compulsion is tragedy, there are a million things in between those two extremes. All sex that occurs without the merging of hearts and bodies is not the desperate self-destructive behavior of Shame.
Which brings us to the other point of this triad, the other intersection tangled up in all this mess: the conflation of love and marriage. Let me be clear: I believe in love. I absolutely believe in love. And I believe in marriage. But they are not the same thing.
Love is a personal, emotional good. It is the thing that creates empathy in us, it is the thing that causes us to act against survival instincts and for a better world, it is the thing that allows us to see beyond the borders of our bodies and create meaningful connections in the external world. Marriage, on the other hand, is a purely social good. The benefit of marriage is the social stability it represents. But love is not marriage and marriage is not love. You do not have to get married if you love someone. And if you do get married, you do not necessarily love the person you marry.
I think that a significant portion of the "sex in marriage" movement could really be more aptly defined as "sex in love" if we could all just recognize that love and marriage are not the same thing. Way back when marriages were arranged, it was clear to everyone involved that a marriage was a social contract and that love had nothing to do with it. I don't advocate returning to such a system, mostly because of the way it treated women as chattel. But that doesn't mean that we need to dismiss the idea of marriage as a social good. Rather, in a world like today when marriage is not the only basis of social stability, it is even more important that we remember that marriage is merely a social good. One singular one. It is not a magic bullet that will solve any and all problems, either personal or political. Getting married will not make your life suddenly better; if you weren't happy before, you won't be happy long-term after the novelty wears off. And falling marriage rates are not to blame for the plethora of social problems we face (ahem, Grothman/Santorum/et al.). There are other causes, because while marriage is a social good, it is not the social good.
There is nothing inherently wrong with sex, whether meaningful or meaningless. Sexual identity and appetite, in all their varied forms, are not evidence of some other problem. We all need love, yes. And sex is not love. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't have sex. And we all want love. But that doesn't mean we should all get married right now.
And when I put that out there into the public sphere of the internet, I got this reply: "Might want to include 'consensual' and 'between adults.' " And my first reaction was something like, "Well, duh. Obviously." And I was just about to make some polite reply about a 140 character limit and all that noise, when I stopped. Because you know what?
Duh. Obviously.
"Non-consensual sex" is not a thing that exists, world. Non-consensual sex is RAPE. And rape is not sex. When did sex, as a word or an idea or an act, become so tainted that it has to be minutely distinguished from rape in public discourse? Is sex so dirty, so awful, and so much of a violation that it is inherently indistinguishable from rape? No. And it is both disturbing and deeply saddening to come to the realization that a lot of people might feel it so.
Sex is not bad. Sex is beautiful. There is nothing wrong with sex.
While I do think that at least some fear of sex stems from a deep-seated misogyny (you should read some of the things that Bukowski and Warhol had to say about sex and women, golly geez) I don't think it's a universal explanation. The woman that told me I ought to add "consensual and between adults" to my exhortation that there is nothing wrong with sex, for example: I don't think she hates women.
Rather, I think there's a strange modern conflation of love and sex, and also love and marriage, that ends up creating a bizarre triangle in which the points are love, sex, and marriage and everything becomes a tangled mess.
To wit, physical intimacy and emotional intimacy do go hand-in-hand. And it's not a purely female thing, as so many want to claim. Yes, women form attachments when they sleep with someone. So do men. Men are, in fact, capable of rich emotional lives. Sex is better, for both parties, when there's love involved, and trust, and respect. Anais Nin said, "Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy." And she was right.
Sex is often seen as proof of love, which is where things begin to become murky. "Nobody dies from lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from." (Margaret Atwood) Feeling unloved really does feel an awful lot like dying, and because the connection between love and sex is so deeply instilled, the urge to go out and have a lot of sex to stave off that death, that desperation, that utter loneliness can be strong. Nothing in modern culture has captured the absolute soullessness of using sex as a bandaid like Steve McQueen's Shame. I was horrified to read reviews of that film talking about "normal human sexuality" and "unsexiness." The thing that makes Shame such a powerful film is that it is not about normal human sexuality, or sexiness, and yet its protaganist is still a sympathetic and poignant character. McQueen and Michael Fassbender together have created a space in which behavior that be would be considered depravity and degeneration in less capable hands is instead merely tragic. The moral judgment against sex itself is removed, and the obvious distress of the character is the moral grounding of the narrative.
Like everything else in the emotional landscape of a human being, there are greys and gradations in sex. If sex within love is ecstasy, and sex by self-destructive compulsion is tragedy, there are a million things in between those two extremes. All sex that occurs without the merging of hearts and bodies is not the desperate self-destructive behavior of Shame.
"Sex without love is a meaningless experience, but as far as meaningless experiences go its pretty damn good." - Woody AllenThat grey world is where most of us live. We neither find "true love" nor do we descend into addiction. And in that grey world, there is nothing wrong with sex. Sex without love might be meaningless, as Mr. Allen says, but not everything in life must be pregnant with meaning. Not every conversation must be weighted, not every book must be serious, not every film must be exposing social thought constructs, not every sexual experience must be Capital-E-Ecstasy. There is nothing so inherently wrong about sex that it cannot be lighthearted and fun.
“It would be perfect if everyone who makes love, is in love, but this is simply an unrealistic expectation. I'd say 75 percent of the population of people who make love, are not in love, this is simply the reality of the human race, and to be idealistic about this is to wait for the stars to aline and Jupiter to change color; for the Heavens to etch your names together in the sky before you make love to someone. But idealism is immaturity, and as a matter of fact, the stars may never aline, Jupiter may never change color, and the Heavens may never ever etch your names together in the sky for you to have the never-ending permission to make endless love to one another. And so the bottom line is, there really is no difference between doing something today, and doing something tomorrow, because today is what you have, and tomorrow may not turn out the way you expect it to. At the end of the day, sex is an animalistic, humanistic, passionate desire.”
― C. JoyBell C.
Which brings us to the other point of this triad, the other intersection tangled up in all this mess: the conflation of love and marriage. Let me be clear: I believe in love. I absolutely believe in love. And I believe in marriage. But they are not the same thing.
Love is a personal, emotional good. It is the thing that creates empathy in us, it is the thing that causes us to act against survival instincts and for a better world, it is the thing that allows us to see beyond the borders of our bodies and create meaningful connections in the external world. Marriage, on the other hand, is a purely social good. The benefit of marriage is the social stability it represents. But love is not marriage and marriage is not love. You do not have to get married if you love someone. And if you do get married, you do not necessarily love the person you marry.
I think that a significant portion of the "sex in marriage" movement could really be more aptly defined as "sex in love" if we could all just recognize that love and marriage are not the same thing. Way back when marriages were arranged, it was clear to everyone involved that a marriage was a social contract and that love had nothing to do with it. I don't advocate returning to such a system, mostly because of the way it treated women as chattel. But that doesn't mean that we need to dismiss the idea of marriage as a social good. Rather, in a world like today when marriage is not the only basis of social stability, it is even more important that we remember that marriage is merely a social good. One singular one. It is not a magic bullet that will solve any and all problems, either personal or political. Getting married will not make your life suddenly better; if you weren't happy before, you won't be happy long-term after the novelty wears off. And falling marriage rates are not to blame for the plethora of social problems we face (ahem, Grothman/Santorum/et al.). There are other causes, because while marriage is a social good, it is not the social good.
There is nothing inherently wrong with sex, whether meaningful or meaningless. Sexual identity and appetite, in all their varied forms, are not evidence of some other problem. We all need love, yes. And sex is not love. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't have sex. And we all want love. But that doesn't mean we should all get married right now.
Monday, March 5, 2012
Rejection is a Lesson
I think the hardest lesson in compassion is this: accepting that not everyone will want you. And, that's ok.
My struggles with trust and intimacy remain ongoing, and probably will for the rest of my life. These are not things that you ever stop really wrestling with, once you've started. Maybe they'll simmer on the backburner more often as years go by and I become more comfortable with the terrifying notion of letting someone else in on my life, but they'll still need to be revisited. I know this, I've known this, I was prepared for this.
What I was not fully prepared for was rejection. In my hubris and megalomania, I glossed over the fact that other people are people and will have feelings and ideas of their own, and needs and wants of their own, and I am not guaranteed to be something that anyone else either desires or needs. In fact, odds are I will not be someone that even most people want or need in their life.
It makes perfect sense, when I see it in black-and-white like that.
But still, but still, but still.
When you're struggling through just the idea of letting your guard down, it's really hard to do it and then be rejected. It's really hard to let someone in only to have them walk right back out. It hurts. A lot.
But hurt is not a reason to lash out. Sadness is not a reason to stop exercising compassion. Other people get to do what they need to do, and be with the people they need to be with, in order to make their own lives better, in order to round out their own internal spaces. Other people, also, get to build airy light palaces in their hearts and minds and populate those glass castles with the people that bring them the most joy.
And I don't get to assert that I have to be one of those people, simply because I want to be.
And if I want to bring someone deep into the heart of my airy light glass castle, but they'd prefer I remain in the outer ring of theirs, I don't get to smash things because I'm not getting my way. Compassion is being there for people in the ways that they want, and the ways that they need, at the times of their choosing. I get to make my choices, yes, but others get to make their own, and if there's a mismatch or a disconnect, compassion demands that we continue to do what we have done, even if we wanted more.
Rejection is the right of every person. Every person is self-determining. And no matter how much it aches, respect for those determinations is the heart of compassion. Self-determination is not an excuse for wretched self-centeredness.
My palace is dimmed, but I'll find another way to light it up. And in the meantime, I will not throw stones. I will practice compassion.
My struggles with trust and intimacy remain ongoing, and probably will for the rest of my life. These are not things that you ever stop really wrestling with, once you've started. Maybe they'll simmer on the backburner more often as years go by and I become more comfortable with the terrifying notion of letting someone else in on my life, but they'll still need to be revisited. I know this, I've known this, I was prepared for this.
What I was not fully prepared for was rejection. In my hubris and megalomania, I glossed over the fact that other people are people and will have feelings and ideas of their own, and needs and wants of their own, and I am not guaranteed to be something that anyone else either desires or needs. In fact, odds are I will not be someone that even most people want or need in their life.
It makes perfect sense, when I see it in black-and-white like that.
But still, but still, but still.
When you're struggling through just the idea of letting your guard down, it's really hard to do it and then be rejected. It's really hard to let someone in only to have them walk right back out. It hurts. A lot.
But hurt is not a reason to lash out. Sadness is not a reason to stop exercising compassion. Other people get to do what they need to do, and be with the people they need to be with, in order to make their own lives better, in order to round out their own internal spaces. Other people, also, get to build airy light palaces in their hearts and minds and populate those glass castles with the people that bring them the most joy.
And I don't get to assert that I have to be one of those people, simply because I want to be.
And if I want to bring someone deep into the heart of my airy light glass castle, but they'd prefer I remain in the outer ring of theirs, I don't get to smash things because I'm not getting my way. Compassion is being there for people in the ways that they want, and the ways that they need, at the times of their choosing. I get to make my choices, yes, but others get to make their own, and if there's a mismatch or a disconnect, compassion demands that we continue to do what we have done, even if we wanted more.
Rejection is the right of every person. Every person is self-determining. And no matter how much it aches, respect for those determinations is the heart of compassion. Self-determination is not an excuse for wretched self-centeredness.
My palace is dimmed, but I'll find another way to light it up. And in the meantime, I will not throw stones. I will practice compassion.
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