New Again

I’ve begun running again. For most of high school, I used to run every evening after school around our subdivision. It would be totally silent, and mostly dark. There were streets that were pitch-black those were my favorite ones to run in. I could be sure there would be no one there (because no one was as insanely lacking of the instinct of self-preservation as I was), and running in the blackness made me feel like I was disappearing, too. I liked that feeling.

Noting the difference in my phases of depression / mania prior and post to that period of regular, strenuous physical activity, I’m fairly convinced that exercise is an extremely powerful mood regulator that is largely ignored by the psychiatric field. My own psychiatrist freely admits to this disregard of the psychiatry towards anything that isn’t psychoanalysis or pharmacological – anything that has to do with emotion or the body and its needs. Basically, all the psychiatric theories that had been carefully constructed for decades were thrown out with the rise of psychopharmacology in the 80’s. And that’s a terrible shame, because meds only work for so long.

Anyway, I abandoned running and the gym when I started college. That’s really when everything went to shit. I’m only realizing this now that I think about it.

I still don’t really like to run in the gym, on a treadmill. I love running at night, though. I’d forgotten how pleasurable it was – not at all something to slog through in the name of fitness. I lost track of time as I ran quietly around the empty streets. In the previous years, plenty of streetlights have been installed, and I no longer hear the evening symphony of the toads in the puddles of the empty lots, or the crickets in the trees. They’ve probably all been murdered by pesticides. And I’ve given up on ever spotting a firefly again – when just a few years ago, I once saw a whole swarm of fireflies in the highest treetops. It was such a lovely sight that sometimes I wonder if I dreamt it while I was lying on top of the water tower. (It, too, has since been fenced with barbed wire.)

So many things have changed. But the air was still fresh and cool, and it was still quiet enough for my thoughts. There was a full moon, and enough clouds in the sky to reflect its light – but not so many clouds that they blocked out all the stars. The trees, the houses, the grass and the streets were all silver.

“In the sky, the darkness surrounded the moon, and it seemed like at any second it would take over, and the moon would be no more. And yet its light shone on the ground. How could it be that the moonlight had no effect on the darkness around it? How did it reach the earth without leaving some silver trace? He felt his intelligence and curiosity quicken, and he knew he would eventually find the answer; and when he did, he would love moonlight. From understanding, to love, was not such a big step.”

– What Hearts, Bruce Brooks 

I want to take you here. I want to drive with you in my father’s (long gone) dark red pickup truck and find the darkest street with the clearest view of the stars. I’ll spread out a blanket in the back and we’ll lie there like the teenagers we no longer are. I want to make you feel young again; I want to hear your laugh, deep and rich and full of joy. I want to lay my head against your chest and listen to the beating of your heart. I want to run my fingers over and over in your hair. I want to bury my face in your familiar scent, in the hollow between your shoulder and your neck that I’ve fit into like it was molded for me. We are not new, you and I – we’ve been lost, found, kicked around. But I can make us feel new again.

On many of my solitary nights running around and around here, I used to wonder if I”d ever have anyone next to me. On some nights, I felt the loneliness so strongly, I felt convinced that no one would ever love me.

How wonderful to be wrong about that one thing.

 

Victim Blaming Vs. Victim Responsibility pt. 2

The selfish lifestyles of the middle / upper class have created nasty inhuman individuals whose lives are so wretchedly poor that they no longer have anything to lose.

I’m sure someday we’ll solve this complicated social problem because we’re obviously the smartest people in the world. But for now, unless you’re rich and smart enough to be kept safe all the time (you always have your own car / driver, you have people around to look after you, you know what situations to avoid) you WILL face these inhuman individuals, and they WILL hurt you if they can.

Those slogans you see around? “My clothes are not my consent”? Those were created by rich white girls who have approximately 0.00000% chance of being gang-raped and left for dead. They don’t know you. They don’t know your situation. Why would you let them influence your behavior? They’re not your mother, they’re not your best friend, but most importantly, they’re not you. You owe it to yourself to understand your situation and protect your weaknesses.

I don’t want this online movement to make you ignore the danger of your reality. Like I said, someday we’ll solve everything – I’ll make the feminist equivalent of The Playboy Mansion where we’ll all live happily ever after and bond in sisterly love or whatever. You gotta stay alive for that. I’m barely in my twenties, dammit, give me some time. For now, I have these tips for you:

1. Glasses lessen the slut factor of any outfit by about 70%. If you have 20/20 vision, use a pair without lenses.

2. Fix your walk. It’s probably the most little-known yet significant factor of how criminals select their victims.

3. During events that end late at night, do not rely on transportation from vague acquaintances or flaky friends. If there’s no other transportation available, skip the fucking event. It won’t kill you, but a rapist might.

4. About 90% of guys who approach you when you look hot are just brimming with shit. Say you have a boyfriend or something. (Note: if you want a boyfriend who likes you for you, try dating someone who sees you often not looking your best. Like a PE classmate or something, god I don’t know.)

5. Become healthy and strong. work out a lot. eat vegetables. i’m sleepy

A Further Note on That Earlier Note

“Reading The Well of Loneliness was one of the things that helped me make it through the concentration camps… I wanted to live long enough to kiss a woman.” – a Polish woman after WW2

In the beginning, we would stay in for stretches of a full day and a night, having sex and stopping only to sleep and eat.

Once I woke up in the darkness to her touching me, almost inside me. And I realized that my body had started responding to her even when I wasn’t awake, not even dreaming.

Masturbation is often just a treat for myself, like junk food or a frivolous purchase – a personal indulgence. Sometimes, however, it feels like much more. It’s a huge part of how I began connecting with my own body (which has led me, among other things, to eat better, quit smoking, sleep more) and feeling more comfortable and secure with being alone.

Today reminded me of those days and nights with her, when everything was so new that the world receded to a dull background noise for both of us, and we were only vaguely aware of the passage of time. Every single moment was pure, unabated pleasure: the buildup, the intensity, the gentle descent. The quiet talks. The slow drift into deep sleep and complete rest. Wake for food. Begin again.

It was exactly the same cycle today, with myself. I fully believe that to connect with someone else, a person has to learn to connect with herself first. Not herself only, but herself first.

I was surprised, I guess, at how much pleasure and contentment I could make myself feel. I laid out food in the morning. As the hours passed, I came alone in bed again and again. After each time I’d drift off to sleep under the soft, thick comforter, not bothering to wash, like how we’d do then, happy to be covered in each other’s warmth and smell.

It isn’t this way for me all the time when I masturbate. But when it is, it’s so wonderful. I’ve mentioned before how society’s uncomfortable with nakedness – so much so that many people can’t even be naked in front of themselves, and feel love.

I’m so grateful for this.

* * * * *

unrelated? recently I passed a group of varsity athletes in their tiny tiny shorts with their long legs and strong arms and woman-swaggers and ponytails a-swing, and I had a brief vision of them somehow fucking me all at once and for some reason, I had no choice in the matter at all.

Rage and Taboos

I’m constantly looking for answers about my behavior, my feelings which occasionally mystify me as much as they mystify other people.

I.

Here’s a tentative answer about my near-constant rage about society and definitely-constant search for love:  

If I was going to write a novel,  I’d write of our societal narcissism, our search for identity– and, more importantly, for excuses why we have certain identities; and the decline of truly meaningful relationships to write a novel about what really keeps us linked to each other.

The operative question would be: if you could be anyone, had unlimited power, what would be the ethical system you use to make choices? Who lives, who dies, who suffers, who doesn’t? How do you decide?

The first element would be Faith. He has to have Faith that he has a superpower, which is to predict the future, in the absence of any definite evidence. The protagonist of my book won’t have any objective evidence that he is right or doing the right thing, he simply will have to believe, to decide, that he’s right. It has to be identical to, say, psychosis. My character would have to both decide he can see the future, and also that it is his responsibility to act on it.

Another element is Rage. When you believe something that no one else believes– especially if you believe you are somehow better, or even different, than others; and if others directly oppose you in this belief, the inevitable consequence is rage. 

The final element is Love. The negating force for Rage. This character will need to identify who he loves, and how to love them.  – The Last Psychiatrist (adapted)

II.

About why horrible things turn me on during masturbation (Which is part of the reason why I consider sex and masturbation as two almost completely distinct and dissimilar activities):

I got curious about why people are sexually aroused by taboo, and I did some theorizing and fact-checking.

It all comes down to your brain being really shitty at knowing what it is feeling at any given time. Since it struggles with this, it often sneaks a peek at what the body is doing and guesses based on that – for example, “Flushed face? Butterflies in stomach? I must be attracted to this person!”

In the case of taboo, this causes a certain degree of non-sexual arousal, which happens to incite similar physiological responses (your blood flow increases, your breathing becomes faster, etc.). The brain interprets this as part of the sexual arousal, and voila! You are turned on by something that repulses you so vehemently that it literally makes your blood boil!

In summary: The brain muddles up different emotions and physiological responses a lot, and that’s the reason why you may be aroused by something that strongly opposes your beliefs.

– A Cracked.com commenter on an article about BDSM 

What kind of an emotion of fear would be left if the feeling neither of quickened heart-beats nor of shallow breathing, neither of trembling lips nor of weakened limbs, neither of goose-flesh nor of visceral stirrings, were present, it is quite impossible for me to think … I say that for us emotion dissociated from all bodily feeling is inconceivable. – William James, 1893

This is also a very interesting scientific study (NOT conjecture, which an important distinction from the things I’ve talked about above) about the areas in the body where different emotions are felt (I usually only post links to provide sources, but I do want readers this time to actually go over there and read about this study):

Researchers in Finland have compiled the first authoritative atlas of “body maps” that detail where we feel emotions. It would seem that idioms such as a chest puffed with pride, or cold feet, are very much seated in physiological reality.

Looking at the maps, it’s amazing how each emotion triggers a very specific and unique physiological response. We can now clearly see that happiness and love actually make us feel sensation in our whole bodies. Sadness is felt in the heart, and decreases the feeling of everything else, except for parts of the face. Depression is an all-over lack of sensation. It is startling to see shame’s intense increase of sensation in the head and cheeks, fluttering heart and stomach, and numbness of legs so accurately depicted.