She-Cave

This is another to deserve the disclaimer that you may not want to read any further...


It was that moment, there in the garage, as she guided my hands to unzip her jacket, and pull down her tank top, exposing the most magnificent breasts.  That moan, which escaped her perfect lips as I caressed her neck and shoulder with my mouth.  The contrast of hot and cold.  The excitement of being in  a space both removed and exposed.  The image of her, chest rising ever more quickly and pronounced as I moved down her body with my hands and my mouth.  The moisture that we both expressed and experienced.  The taste on my tongue, so familiar yet never taken for granted and always anticipated and longed for.  There simply aren't words for the surge that rushes through me as she moans "oh my god,Jamie, please don't stop!"  There is true longing, almost desperation in her words, and it translates through her body and into my mouth and hands and through my whole body.  "I want you inside of me too" escapes through a smile, and my tongue is invigorated as I cross her threshold.  And then the dam is burst and she jolts as the culmination of my labors rushes over me, and her body undulates as she pulls my head to her and holds me there.  I could live and die in that moment, just like every moment with her.  I feel the energy of the entire universe telling me, "HER", but if you hold on she will be lost.  So I watch, as she finds her wings, and pray to a god I'm not sure exists, that I get to always see her fly.  Such beauty, grace, and greatness have yet to find their equal in my eyes.

Epic!

Feeling inspired tonight, so bear with me....

Yes, I am odd.  I am awkward in new social settings.  And I often say the wrong thing at the wrong time, and embarrass friends, family, lovers, co-workers, and people who don’t even know my name.  And yes I have damage, and I cry more than is comfortable for others to witness.  I have been battle bruised and scarred almost from birth; but haven’t we all?  And haven’t we all come through it to this point?  Life is a terminal condition, but it hasn’t gotten us yet!  We have survived everything she has thrown at us, and will continue to do so until life removes our variable from the equation.  And at that point, it ceases to be our problem to solve, our burden to bear; but what if we can circumvent that step?!  What if we can cast off those shackles of guilt, and shame, and heartbreak, and embarrassment, and utter despair preemptively?  What if we can say to the void that we will not accept the bullshit any longer?  What if we can claim our own lives for ourselves?  What if we decide that from this moment on we will laugh with no regard for image, and love with every ferocious fiber we possess, and cry when we are sad, but pick ourselves up and move on?!  What if we refuse the dogma and stigma and the social norms and mores which would pigeon hole us into thinking that we are limited and broken and hopeless?!  That is my challenge, for myself, to myself, from myself!  And it WILL be epic!

THERAPY

            Behavior is purposeful. That’s what my last shrink told me.  Over and over again she would recite that mantra.  It was meant to help me to see that my thoughts and actions pertaining to my PTSD had a root[1] somewhere.  It wasn’t until later that I learned what a root even was, or that it was pertinent to find them, weed them out, exhume them, and then to be able to move on.  P!nk says “We’re not broken, just bent.”  I like that one equally well.  It has hope.  It says that whatever the circumstance, whatever the mental blockage or stuck point (again from my therapist), we can move on.  We can mend.  We can move beyond and heal.  My mother recently sent me a meme from Facebook that sparked my thought process on healing.  All of these things, all of these people have led me to one grand epiphany, and that is that life, in all its ups and down, heartbreaks and soaring moments of triumph, IS therapy.  The people that we interact with and listen, really listen to, are our therapists.  This is not to discount the value of actual therapy, the kind where you meet with someone qualified by years of training to help you move past things, but to give merit to the people we meet and the experiences we have with them.

            Roots.  Those little bastards that have buried themselves down so deep into your psyche that it takes damn near a miracle to pull them up, well, they’re everywhere.  At least they are for me.  The first earth shattering root that I discovered and dug out wore the same face that I did at five years old.  She was blonde haired, with torn blue jeans, and you could see the absolute terror in those tiny hazel eyes of hers.  If you looked deep enough, long enough, you could see the events which transpired which firmly planted her into my sub-conscious.  I’ve written about them so much in the process of my therapy that they almost seem a cliché to me now.  She was hurt, several times, and by several people, and it won’t help to dig any further into that so I’ll move on.  The point of that root is that it opened a kind of Pandora’s Box of other roots for me.  When I pulled her out, and gave her a voice, she was no longer attached to every other root; no longer did she color every experience I had with another human being.  I had had no idea that for thirty years this one root had been the lens through which I would view my interactions and relationship with every other human being.  Completely in my sub-conscious, she was there, telling me to be careful, to keep my distance because everyone would end up hurting me eventually.  She was incessant with her assertion that I had been a bad person, which was why bad things happened to me.  Her terror led her to believe that any kind of perceived weakness or vulnerability would serve as a beacon to the very worst in people, and that they WOULD take advantage of that. 

            Vulnerability is quite an interesting word.  Depending on one’s lens, it can mean so many different things.  For me it meant not just the opportunity to be hurt, but the absolute guarantee that I would undergo agonizingly painful experiences if I let it show.  Judging the world around me through this lens, I spent decades assuming the very worst, and physically and emotionally distancing myself from, well, everyone.  We’ve all heard the adage that “misery loves company”, but in the case of fear of everyone and everything, my misery demanded absolute solitude.  So I lived my life apart, alone, unable to truly connect with anyone, unable to settle down or to have any kind of home base.  In one of my very favorite books, Antoine de Saint Exupery wrote “[S]o I lived alone, without anyone that I could really talk to…”[2] , and that certainly held true for me.  Now, I don’t mean to portray my life as tragic, or lacking in love or friendship.  I had all of these things.  I was just unable and unwilling to truly let anyone in, or to truly seek out to know anyone else. 

It took eight solid months (of what was supposed to be a 12 week program) before I could begin to see vulnerability as more than a weakness and beacon for disaster.  It took more than a year after that before I could finally let all of my barriers down and be completely open and honest with someone.  The first person I was able to do that with, as sappy as it may sound, was me.  It was indeed, just as I had anticipated, agonizingly painful, even torturous, for quite some time, until one day it wasn’t anymore.  Eventually I came to an emotional breakthrough, and this complete self honesty was finally liberating, and comforting, and amazingly, well, amazing.  The second person I was able to experience this kind of total emotional, wall-shattering interaction with will probably be my best friend for the rest of my life.  If nothing else, I will always treasure her for honoring me and my vulnerable and sometimes (we could even say often at this juncture) uncomfortable full disclosure of self.  That I could make that kind of connection with another person, and that this person did not violate this trust, was monumental in my trek to get beyond the emotional peak of the mountain. 

Having stated that it took an exorbitant amount of time to get through my therapy program, it should be stated that there were several factors at play.  The first of these factors was that I lacked severely in the most basic of coping skills.  At thirty years old I had to re-learn how to process nearly everything.  Having shed that hazel-eyed lens I was now at a juncture where I simply did not know how to process my own emotions and experiences.  I was void, vacuous, without the ability to even verbalize what I was feeling, and this was worse even than simply expecting the worst of everyone.  I felt constantly out of control, unable to realize what I was feeling, and so every emotion turned into anger for me.  The thing that I think most people don’t realize about anger, and people they would describe as angry, is that it is a very defensive emotion.  You see, the image of an angry person does not invite face-to-face scrutiny.  It repels people.  The best offense being a good defense, it was my way of keeping the world at large, at bay.  Whenever anything happened which triggered an emotional response, my brain responded with the muscle memory which I had given it, and turned it to anger.  This was true of positive emotion as well as negative.  Finally I began to see that even my children expected an angry response from me, even in the best of circumstances.  This was, of course, with the help of my therapist.

Stopping midway through my therapy program, we backtracked, and began what I came to know as Skills Training.  Months of writing about every instance which elicited an emotional response, and going through prescribed steps and worksheets eventually paid off, and allowed me to be able to assess each and every situation based upon its own merit and particular circumstance, until finally I was able to stave off the anger, and just feel the emotion as it came and eventually went.  Doc compared the process of acknowledging and processing emotion with watching a wave come in and go out, without trying to hold it to the shoreline.  I still use that metaphor whenever strong negative emotions arise.  (Visualizations became huge for me as well)  The key to the wave metaphor is that one MUST accept that the emotion is there for a reason, and that it is futile to try to fight it off, or to hold onto it.  The best thing is to watch it as it comes in, to appreciate it for the merit that it has, and then to let it go, watch it disappear into the horizon.  The key here is that our, my emotional responses to things have merit, they are there for a reason, and to acknowledge that is to allow, to find that root, and to dig it out.  It is impossible to see and understand the distant winds over the water, while you are standing in the water, being bowled over by the crashing tides.  What skills training did for me was to give me a tower, a lighthouse, to watch the tides come in and go out, to experience their beauty and ferocity, without being crushed by them.  It was an integral part in the ability I have today to live and love my life.

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[1] Johnson, Kasey.  2013.  She gifted me this word, along with the help to find and deal with many a long-buried root.

[2] The Little Prince

Puzzled

Texting with a friend this morning, and really over numerous conversations, with numerous people, it occurred to me that I didn’t have the customary attraction to sneaking around authority figures as a kid that most do.  Upon some reflection this morning I have come to some realizations.  The first, is that being one of six children it is fairly easy to get lost in the crowd.  This made me question my self-proclaimed loathe of attention and recognition.  So I decided to dig a little deeper.  I then found myself feeling like what I was after was to be seen.  This is not in the look at me look at me sense though.  I think that I spent most of my childhood and adolescence hiding from myself even.  I’ve always known, well at least since I recognized what it was, that I was attracted to women.  Being raised as I was, surrounded by well-intentioned religious stigma regarding homosexuality, coupled with homophobic jokes and comments from family and friends alike, this deep dark secret was devastating to me.  I would never be normal, right, righteous, or acceptable, even to myself.  This then led me (see how ADD works with the feeble minded???) to think about what a melancholy kid I often was.  I had a lot of pain that I was dealing with, and didn’t even have the vocabulary to process it all.  So I developed a very tough image that I portrayed.  The best defense being a good offense (that’s how the saying goes right?), I became a very hard and angry person.  I believed that if I was mean enough, hard enough, strong enough, that I couldn’t be hurt again.  But the truth of the matter was that I was still hurting.  Every day, and especially at night, I hurt, and I was petrified, of everything.  The real problem with hiding under the guise of strength, if you get good enough at it, is that it doesn’t occur to those around you that you are not capable, not able to process and/or handle difficult situations that come up.  The thought process develops in the minds of those around you that you are a truly strong person, and that you can handle anything and everything that comes your way.  The real kick in the gut is that you have nobody to blame but yourself, as you have put every effort into projecting yourself as that person who CAN and WILL handle, deal, survive, thrive even.  I believe there is a terrible price to pay for dishonesty with oneself.  It comes in a packaged deal with guilt, self-loathing, anger, depression, and loneliness.  And once you’ve slid so far down the rabbit hole that you truly believe you can’t find your way out, then maybe, just maybe you start to realize that you are not in fact as tough and as strong as you think that you need to be.  Maybe then you realize that a connection with another human being is what you’ve needed and craved all along.  Distancing yourself from everyone and everything in an effort to become strong has really only weakened you.  This is how it was for me at any rate.  In letting go, and allowing myself to acknowledge my own nature, that I DO long for that connection, that space to be vulnerable and trusting with another person, I’ve found a kind of new and empowering strength.  I’ve discovered that I revel in conversation, communication, connection.  It’s how I best learn and grow, and how I’m best able to see myself.  It’s possible that this is what I’ve needed all along, to be able to see myself.  I’ve needed to get out of my box, out of my bunker to see myself and the world at large from other perspectives to be able to piece the puzzle, my puzzle, together.

  

Climb On!!

For years now I’ve tried everything I could think of to get Julie into some kind of activity.  I searched for anything that would keep her moving, active, healthy.  I heard once that young girls who have low activity levels can start menstruating earlier, and thus my frantic search began.  We’ve tried soccer, t-ball, swimming, skating, cycling, literally everything I could possibly think of.  I had exhausted every avenue I knew of, until one day I went indoor rock climbing with a friend.  Now, I had done this before, and quite enjoyed it, but never before like I did this time.  I’ve been on a bit of a climbing kick now, and last week I decided to try Julie out at it, just see if she could even hold herself to the wall without getting all worked up about the height etc.  Good grief was I amazed at what that kid is capable of!  The first day we went I had her on the kid’s bouldering wall.  She kept climbing over and over again, looking for different routes and trying to beat her previous time.  The next day we went back and I put a harness and rope on her to see what she could do with a 30 foot wall…. And I’ll be damned if she didn’t shimmy herself up the entire thing.  She paused only once, to ask if she could keep going.  SO, after years of trying, and millions of tears shed over soccer and t-ball fields, and blood knees and elbows from the skating, I do believe we have found Julie’s sport/activity.  My girl is every bit the crazy monkey that her mother is…. And it makes me pretty damned proud J

One Hell of a Ride

DISCLAIMER:  IF YOU'RE SQUEAMISH ABOUT MY LIFESTYLE OR THINK YOU MIGHT NOT WANT TO KNOW THAT PART OF MY LIFE EVEN EXISTS, YOU MAY WANT TO STOP READING RIGHT NOW.

It’s funny how beginnings and ends can be so intricately woven together, that with the blink of an eye you’ve made the transition from one to the other.  And your head is left spinning, and your heart is left weeping… and rejoicing at the ups and downs of the roller coaster that you just stepped off of.  And you’ve found yourself in this strange limbo of wishing to god that you were still on the ride, and just being immensely grateful that you got to ride at all, and hopeful that the next ride will come along soon.  I feel like I’ve just stepped off of my very first roller coaster.  My head is still spinning, and I feel a little nauseated at both the ride and this anxious fear that the next one is far away.  But it was one hell of a ride.  I got to experience the sensation of sleeping next to and holding someone I cared about, and whom I wanted to be sleeping next to.  I got to be amazed by the feelings and sensations of being with a woman.  I got to experience intimacy for the first time.  I was given so many firsts, including my first heartbreak.  My first tears shed over feelings and emotions that I’m still not capable of fully wrapping my head around.  I can’t define it, and I can’t seem to find a way to articulate it in a way that makes any sense to me.  And still... it was one hell of a ride!  

Cost vs. Value

This one is definitely more random, and if it would help, I'd give the whole back story to it's genesis, but I think that would only serve to complicate things more.  Suffice it to say, I was in a weird, Marxist kind of mood when I wrote it:

When I was eight years old I made an astonishing discovery.  My parents kept the allowance cups for all six of their children just behind the kitchen sink.  It was all too easy to reach up and move money from any of my siblings’ cups to my own, and in fact I did on several occasions.  At the time this amounted to just slightly more than a dollar, a paltry amount by most standards, but later in life, as I make preparations to pay an allowance to my own children, and having studied some in the field of economics, I have come to a realization about this money which nobody ever noticed was missing. 

            In studying the writings of Karl Marx I was struck by his theory of Use-Value.  This theory relates the value of a thing to its utility, and states that “Use-values become a reality only by use or consumption: they also constitute the substance of all wealth, whatever may be the social form of that wealth.”  What struck me especially about this is that these commodities only take on value when they are used or consumed.  By this reasoning, to have something, to simply be in possession of it holds no inherent value in and of itself.  Having grown up in a culture where doomsday preparations are a main priority this theory presented an interesting dilemma; that dilemma being that Marx’s theory rang true somewhere deep in the recesses of my mind, but it also negated a large part of my life-long mental conditioning. 

            Frugality was yet another value that was instilled in me from a very young age, not only from my parents but from the culture which enveloped my small reality.  The prospect of purchasing something for less than the original price held immense value in my belief system.  Thus, whether an item was needed with any immediacy was not even a topic of discussion.  That the world would inevitably come crashing down around us and cause us to need all of these preparations was not just a possibility, nor was it a probability, it was as strongly held a belief as many have that the sun will continue to shine with each new morning. 

            With both of these strongly held “truths” in hand, that one must be in possession of large quantities of commodities, and that to acquire something for less than it was suggested to retail for represented a blessing, I began a feverish study of Marx and his Use-Value principle.  After several months of study I found myself at a completely different understanding of the inherent value of finite objects.  This new found understanding centered in the actual usefulness of an object verses the cost, both monetary and spatial, of maintaining its existence.  Both of these aspects are completely separate from the initial cost of acquiring the object, which I now believe has no merit beyond what one is capable of spending to acquire the object initially.  The conclusion which I came to was that if an object is not currently, or in the very near and real future in use, and needed, its value is diminished materially.  If said object also creates a spatial or monetary cost to maintain, it then takes on a negative value, draining both the family coffers and the space in which the family must live and function.