Tenfold
Nothing chokes me up quite like sex. There’s a reason I discuss it in such a distant, clinical fashion, not just because that’s what I do, or because that is how I am good at it, but because there is something fundamentally wrong with me that I am yet to overcome. I can tell you all about what happened to me, what it felt like, I can write about it. But the idea of doing it with someone I care about, truly, actually care about, makes me feel ill. I can have sex as a detached, cool, service-top, but anyone can really do that if they put their mind and a little enthusiasm into someone else. Actual sex, between loved ones, well, it’s been nearly half a decade since then. I think I’m cold but I realise I’m just fucking terrified. I just start thinking, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t do that, I can’t do any of that. Why? Because it’s wrong, it’s wrong for everyone involved.
And that’s really what’s been eating me up lately. My principles, my fucking principles, and I know on some level my principles are fucking up my life and making me miserable, but I know if I throw them away, I lose everything in the long term. Rules are structures. They protect something, but they need to be maintained. When you break your rules, you make a crack in the structure. Enough cracks and it might even fall down. You can rebuild it, but that pillar will never quite be the same.
I’m tired of lying. Really fucking tired. I am nowhere near as bad as I used to be, not even close, but I notice, I slip, I fall. And every time I do, I hear the deafening crack of one of my pillars. I think about breaking my rules, and I imagine the structure crumbling to dust, as I once saw, nearly a decade ago now.
“Wouldn’t it be nice? Wouldn’t it be nice to do what you want for a while? Go on, just once. Give in.”
And those last two words send a shock through me, and I am back in someone else’s bed getting precisely what I wanted, and hating it, and I’ve spent my entire life unable to decide whether that makes me a victim or a manipulator or if this is all some kind of ruse to cover for the fact that I potentially might have loved it.
I don’t identify as a survivor. I find that a pretentious term for people who want to make their trauma and victimhood their identity to sell Ted presentations. Joke's on both of us, we’re marked by our trauma whether we identify with it or not, the people who just vocally proclaim themselves to be such are compensating for the fact that maybe they aren’t as much as they’d like to think. I can’t stand talking about it, and I can’t stand hearing other people talk about it, not because I can’t handle it, but because I am tired of people making it something to proclaim to the world. It’s just sad, and to be honest, for most people, it can’t be ‘cured’. It is not something that ever truly goes away. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t get better, or you can’t live a good life after it, it just means it’s something that, outside of a grey room with a therapist, is not helping anyone, and outside of that space, it is something to be integrated.
You can call it avoidance. I rewatched The Return recently, a movie nobody except me saw. I think of Odysseus returning home to the absolute ruins of his kingdom, and debating very reasonably whether he wants to take on the task of fixing what he is responsible for leaving to decay. It would be so much easier to run away. But he doesn’t, he stays, and he kills the rot in his country. He denies his wants to pursue what is right. I’m not Odysseus, I’m not anyone, certainly not anyone that matters. But that doesn’t mean that we should abandon what is right. I can want to do the right thing and not try to be a character, it just means paying a character’s price.
“It’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you. You can give in.” Variations ad nauseam.
The thing about a character is that they spread their price among themselves. Siblings pay for each other, parents, friends. When you’re alone for so long you not only do not have anyone to share that price with, but you stop being aware of what prices you are causing yourself. You don’t notice you’re not cleaning up after yourself. There’s no one to correct your antisocial behaviour. You’re there, requiring full vigilance, and doing it alone. But hey, at least it doesn’t hurt as much as yesterday, when a lady brushed your arm passing in the aisle, and you spend the next 10 minutes gripping the handles of the trolley, so overwhelmed with lust that it feels like your heart is going to explode. 10 years of therapy hasn’t solved that, dissociation did. You know that even if you were together, it would be an incredibly underwhelming experience for everyone involved.
But that doesn’t stop the feelings. Desperation. Temptation. An assault on all your senses as your broken attachment system screams at you, “please, anyone, it doesn’t matter if it’s wrong for them, or for me, please”. And you find yourself sitting alone at your computer at 3am knowing that it will never make you feel better, it won’t fix you, and that you have so much more of this to go, of denying yourself, before this will stop being reality.
The solution to all of this is reconnecting. With people, with reality. With people who are good for you, and you are good for them. The problem is that both of those things are very rare. You might have lost the people who were good for you, or pushed away others by being antisocial.
I know what I want, and I know it will hurt me and those around me, and I am just so fucking afraid that one of these days I will stop shaking completely, shatter, and give in again.
I’m not some mysterious romantic. I’m a weirdo who spent too much time learning how people work and turned it into a job. I’m not a starving artist, or a tortured genius, or some misunderstood soul. I ended up here for a reason: because I am a miserable fool who thought he was better than others.