Sex And Its Acquisition

I’m just going to put it right here that this one might be too much information. It’s also going to be a bit rambling. I’ve lacked the clarity for good writing recently (assuming I’ve ever had it), but I need to try. You’ve been warned on both counts.

I have an extremely troubled relationship with sex. I’ve written previously about the sexual abuse I’ve dealt with both as a child and an adult, so I don’t want to spill too much more metaphorical ink there. I’m going to try to focus on the now.

As I’ve aged, I’ve been on my own path of self-analysis and discovery. This has been educational, but it hasn’t been pretty. With the tumult in my personal life over the past year, my focus on my shortcomings has grown by about a million percent. Due to the nature of this tumult, my primary focus has been on how deficient I am with regards to intimate relationships, and not limited to the romantic. As open as I am about my emotional states in written and/or public forums, I have intense difficulty baring my inner self directly to another human being. How this most practically manifests is that I am very good in crowds and very uncomfortable with spending time with just one other person. It’s as if I have an inverted form of social anxiety.

Practical examples: I can put an open invite on Facebook to see if someone wants to join me for lunch, but the idea of messaging someone directly is terrifying. Writing about my depression or anxiety, or talking about it in abstracts to a group of people is fine, but really opening up about it to another person is something I just don’t do. Talking with one person is just too intense. I feel like I’m burdening them. With a public discussion, anyone who wants to chime in can, while when I speak to one person, I feel as if I’m forcing them into the position to where they feel obligated to respond. I hate doing that because it feels like passive-aggressive coercion.

This interpersonal anxiety has lately been at its highest level in my life. Knowing that I’m going to be hanging out with someone fills me with a certain amount of dread. My biggest fear, and I know a lot of people who know me will find this hilarious or baffling, is that I won’t have a damned thing to say. This is coming from the guy who never shuts the fuck up and ends up dominating just about every group conversation he’s in (sorry). I feel this intense performance anxiety that I never felt stepping onto a stage in front of hundreds of people. On a stage, I’m anonymous. I’m not there, and it’s fine. Sitting across the table from someone, I can’t be anonymous. But I’m still terrified that I’m not there, and it’s not fine.

For the record, as much as I dread the idea of prolonged interaction, I make myself do it because I do need it. If I do talk directly to another person, though, it isn’t really a sign that I’m comfortable with them as much as it is a sign that I’m making the efforts to overcome my discomfort in order to show them that they matter to me.  Booze helps.

So. How does this relate to Sex And Its Acquisition, as the title suggest? In a word, profoundly. We’ll take on Sex first.

Do me a favor. I want you to become fully aware of your blinking and focus on it for thirty seconds. I’ll wait.

If you’ve done that, or if you’ve simply recalled a time when you’ve done that before, I can build a metaphor. You take a natural, effortless fact of your life and you’ve intellectualized it. You become aware of just how unnatural and controlled that simple thing is once you are cognizant of it. “Am I blinking often enough? Am I doing it at the same speed that I would if I weren’t controlling it? Are my eyes going to start bleeding? Do I look like Hannibal Lecter?” That’s just with your eyes. Imagine that with your entire body and performance. With sex, Jesus, it’s everything. The performance anxiety has led to a serious focus on technical skill (trying to avoid bragging, but I don’t want it to seem as if that is the problem), but that isn’t intimacy. I’m pretty great at casual sex, but the more I begin to care about someone and the more their opinion matters to me, the more emotionally distant I become during the act. I’m analyzing everything I’m doing at every given second, my partner’s every facial expression and body motion, and every next move that could occur and evaluating each of them, and I am never in the moment. It’s more like I’m playing chess than indulging my carnal urges.

Once again, I don’t want to brag, but I’ve had enthusiastic reviews. I don’t feel inadequate on the technical level. That’s not my concern. However, as it was in school, even when I had a 4.0, I still thought “This is the one I’m going to bomb” before every essay and every test. It’s that same feeling every time a woman starts undressing. Again, though, booze helps. And there is a cause to this performance anxiety. Having been made to feel like a sexual object by an abuser for so long and at such a formative age (and then again and again) still affects me. I know I need to let that go, and I’m working on it, but goddamn, letting go of trauma is not my strong suit.

Let’s move on to Its Acquisition.

Every now and then, someone will make a comment about how sexually successful I am (if praising me), or I’ll hear about someone saying how much I get around (if criticizing me). This rather baffles me. I had a brief stint of “sexual success,” but that was while I lived in New Jersey. Over half of the partners I’ve had in my life were during this time. This was less than three years. I credit this far less to any skill or attribute of mine and far more to the forthrightness and take-charge attitude of Jersey Girls (for which I am deeply grateful). The reality of it is that most of my friends that I’ve talked to about this have had more sexual partners in the past year than I have had in the past decade.

I feel like no small amount of the public perception of my sex life (why is that even a thing?) comes from the fact that I’ve been in open/poly relationships. There’s a certain stigma that comes with that, I suppose, and I guess I’ll just have to live with that. And for the record, I’m not discussing this to try to manage my public image or sway people into my corner. It’s just that if you’re going to praise me or deride me, I’d rather you do it for accurate reasons.

Honestly, I don’t really know how to initiate romantic contact with women. Every now and then, I’ve been “smooth” by accident. Again, booze helps. (I think a pattern is emerging.) It was a little easier when I was a kid and had the brash ignorance and inconsideration of youth on my side. Now, it’s just gotten so awful in my head. That and the social discussion on sex and inter-gender relations has made me even more locked up than I ever was.

Once again, I’ve been made to feel like a sexual object in a profound way that has had lasting effects. I know what it’s like when sex is a threat, not a joy. It contaminates just about all of my perceptions of sex. As a result, I never want to make a woman feel threatened or uncomfortable in any way relating to it. Ever. The very idea makes me feel physically ill. With today’s discourse on male/female relations, I’ve gotten so paranoid about all of this that I can’t comfortably take any action at all. I hear so often that all men are creepers, or potential rapists, and are part of rape culture. Each time that I feel like someone would feel that way about me, it makes me want to jump off of a cliff just to remove my particular perceived threat from the playing field. I’ve even heard the act of saying “Hi” to a woman called “a micro-crime.” So what do I do now? When I see a pretty girl, I refuse to look at her for fear she would be intimidated. I cross the street so a woman won’t think I’m following her. I don’t say hi. I don’t do anything at all, unless a woman has shown irrefutable interest in me. And even then, I’m still paranoid that I’ll make the wrong move and fuck everything up and feel like an awful human being, which causes me to do nothing at all.

I don’t want to make any woman uncomfortable. It’s not because I’m some fedora-wearing Nice Guy, it’s because I know what it’s like. I can empathize with feeling objectified. And I really do get why women feel beset by threats. The environment women live in today is filled with constant objectification and, too often, terrifying physical harm, and I’m crushed to think of it.

The problem is that approaching someone with romantic intent requires the chance that you will make someone uncomfortable, whether you’re male or female. Hell, there are a fair number of academic reports about body language and how breaking the “Moral Looking Time” is a required step in conveying interest. It can also be extremely intimidating. So in my attempts to be as non-threatening as possible, I appear completely disinterested. Either that or women are so used to blatant and invasive acts that my form of showing interest simply doesn’t register. Either way, I’m not hoisting the blame onto women for how it affects my life, it’s just a frustrating reality. We live in a world where it’s the only safe option for women to be immediately defensive in the face of male attention.

So where does this all leave me? Feeling disconnected. Feeling broken. Worst of all, feeling stupid. Like there should be an answer that I’m just too dense to see. My crippling self-consciousness gets in the way of me making meaningful connections, and in no arena more than that of sex and romance. But there was no point to this. No denouement. I haven’t figured anything out here. I’m just complaining, as I do, about how deficient I am, and hoping someone will have the answer for me on how not to feel like such an emotional failure.

But please, if you take anything away from this, let it be this: yes, a lot of human interaction makes me uncomfortable. I still need it and I still enjoy it, despite how anxious it can make me.

Home

The water lapping against my body wakes me slowly. Gravel and dirt on my face in the dark. So cold. So disoriented.

The river. Something Bad happened. I’m not ready to think about it.

My limbs are leaden. Moving hurts through the shuddering, but I have to get up. I have to go home. I have to get to my baby girl. I prop myself up slowly. The cold is in my bones, but I have to get home. I can barely feel the sharp rocks or the flowing water through my frozen nerves, but it’s there. I hurt all over, but I don’t care. I have to go home.

I finally manage to stand. The river is dark, only flickering lights reflecting from the streetlights from the bridge above. I look down at my dress, torn and bloody. Something Bad. Grasping hands and angry mouths – no. The Something Bad can wait. My daughter needs me.

I take a few awkward steps. The shivering almost topples me, but I am of one mind. I take a few more, but fall despite my resolve. It’s doesn’t matter. I have to crawl up the embankment anyways.

I get to street level and pull myself up an overturned garbage can to stand again. It must be late. There isn’t a single car around, nor anyone to beg for help.

I don’t live far. I’ll make it.

I start walking, each step a torturous effort. I’m so fucking cold. I walk through the silent streets, willing myself on.

Something dislodges from between my legs and falls to the sidewalk, making a wet sound in the quiet. I close my eyes and refuse to look at it. It doesn’t matter. Home matters. I keep walking.

My house is dark. My keys are gone, in the purse torn from me by – no. I kneel like an old woman, bracing myself against the door. I push the large flowerpot over by accident, but I find my key. My shivering fingers can barely put it in the lock.

My house is quiet. No crying. I panic. I don’t know how long it’s been since I was here.

My baby.

I crawl up the stairs and down the hall to her room. I again have to drag myself up something to stand, her white, wooden crib. Waste is coming out of the sides of her diaper and there are fine salt tracks from her eyes. My poor little monkey, how long have you been alone? I reach out to hold her to me. She burns to the touch. As I pick her up, she rouses and wails. She must be starving. God knows I am. I clutch her to me, uncaring of the mess. I don’t even smell her – all I smell is the river, even still.

My baby.

So warm.

I try to coo to her, to comfort her, but my throat can only manage a croaking groan. I kiss her head, barely feeling her fine black hair on my lips. I fear dropping her with my unsteady limbs, but I hold her fast. I’m her mother and she is the only precious thing in the world.

I put my lips to her chubby little arms and bite, her warmth pouring down my throat. Hush, little monkey, I want to say as I gulp. Momma’s home.

Tunnel Vision

Though I’m sure it comes from many things, I think a large part of it was from moving around so much. Kindergarten through graduation, I went to ten different schools. Sometimes, they were rapid-fire moves. Between fifth and sixth grade, I went to four schools, and I went to four high schools in those four years.

I was used to being impermanent. Unnecessary. Superfluous.

Possibly worse still, I was used to every person I ever knew or liked being only a fleeting presence in my life. I would know someone just long enough to grow affection for them and then I would never see them again. “Well, my parents are moving to another state. I guess I’ll never see you again, so... bye.”

I coped by devaluing the outcome of closeness and substantive interaction. I accepted that no relationship would last. People became shades, only existing when right in front of my eyes. When they were gone, they no longer existed. That sounds so cold, and it is, but I had no other way to live. Had I tried to maintain my ties, I would have collapsed under the weight of loss. So I gave up trying to care. I gave it up and came to know the difference between isolation and loneliness.

My mother, bouncing back and forth between her obsession with me and her tremendous neglect, made this worse. She would tell me that she was all I needed, but then she spent three years in bed, leaving me with my step-father. He was a fiend. So much so that I never speak his name. He is a monster that looms in my past, my own Unnamable Terror. His seething hatred of me, his constant, explicit reminders that everything I said and was would never be good enough, they drove me further inside. My mother’s insistence that I was her perfect little boy, just as long as I adhered to who she wanted me to be, pushed me deeper.

I became a performer. I Complied. I Appeased. I was whomever others wanted me to be, because who I actually was was nothing anyone cared to see, as far as I knew. I was always a disappointment. Not Good Enough.

Somewhere along the way, I lost who I was. I never got to know myself, not in any clear sense. I can look inside and I can see the trash, but anything good is alien to me. All I see is the broken little boy, terrified of everything and everyone, unable to take any positive affirmation from others.

It seems like I have emotional tunnel vision. My sense that only what is in front of me is real has limited my scope of the world. I see the world through a pinhole. If you are in my field of experience, you take up my whole reality. And when you aren’t, you just fade away. It’s so rare for me to miss someone when they are gone. My mind just doesn’t work that way. When I see a person that I love after a long time, I immediately realize how much I wanted to see them, but I have no prolonged sense of longing for another’s company that I believe others experience. It’s like everyone in the world is The Silence from Doctor Who, except in that moment of seeing and remembrance, it is a feeling of love. And guilt.

Because all of this makes me feel so fucking guilty. I feel like a terrible friend or loved one. Trying to be charitable to myself, I feel like I’m fun to be around. A good conversationalist, good for a laugh. But not good at any of the stuff that cements bonds between others. The little gifts to let others know that I think of them. The spontaneous invitations for a beer. The simple, out of the blue statement “I miss you.”

I live in my own little world, and because I am somehow trapped inside, I require others to knock on the door to my reality. It’s up to everyone else to drag me back to reality to remind me that they exist. I can only assume that to be exhausting, and I’m sure that it is very detrimental to a person’s feeling of being valued by me. I never contact someone first. I am always the respondent. Surely that must make people question if I even like them.

To casual relationships, that strain is likely not so bad. To my closer relationships, this is crippling. How could anyone think anything except that I don’t care?

Possibly my biggest problem to overcome is that, despite the fact that I want to live in the world with people and passion and meaning, I resent it. I resent reality. Even now that I am an adult and have relative control over the path of my life, I still fear everything being swept away, again and again. So I am my own warden here. And, while I need to leave the confines of my head from time to time, I resent constant knocking at the door.

I am trying. I’m trying to reach out occasionally, just to bring some energy to my relationships, so that they aren’t all so one-sided. I don’t want to be this way, and it is probably one of my biggest sources of dissatisfaction in my life.

I mean it when I say I care, but how I care is stunted. After a while, words aren’t good enough, and I know it. I truly want to have stronger connections, to expand the boundaries of my world to include others. I want to annex you. Or maybe just have thriving trade routes, I don’t know, my metaphors are getting away from me (as usual).

What it boils down is that I want to feel like a decent friend. At this point, I have no idea where to start rewiring myself, but as little as simple words mean, I do hold so many great people in my heart, such as it is. If you’re reading this, it’s likely you’re one of them.