10:26 a.m. - June 10, 2008
A Monastery of One
How unlikely I will chance upon someone with whom I'll be sexually fulfilled. As much as I crave it, I still respond poorly to being touched, whether it's innocuous or intimate. And frankly, it's not fair to a presumptive future partner, hook up, or dick-du-jour. To hope to come across a man with a deep reserve of patience who is not dissuaded should I start to shake or worse yet, outright panic, but instead smiles and waits, is a vain hope. Maybe it wouldn't be a vain hope if I were the type that wanted, or responded to, comfort, or pined away for someone with a rescuer complex; that's not what I'm talking about. The problem is that I can't predict when or what will happen - if at all - but most often than not I freeze and am immediately scared once some magical threshold between These Are Good Feelings and Next Step: Sex is crossed. What is it exactly? I love to cuddle a guy, wrap my arms around him and feel his heartbeat; I love to kiss and share what to me is a beautiful intimacy; I love to run my hands over a body thinfathotuglybeautifulshapelyhideoussmoothhairyitdoesntmatter and feel the skin pucker; I love to hear a man or woman gasp with that sharp intake of air only two people can share. To bottom is to invite disaster, an absolute guarantee of panic, the ugly kind where I literally flee, throw up, or just start crying. Real sexy, that. I can will myself to not think about the past, can tell myself that this is a good thing, I am fine, I am comfortable, but as soon as I feel dick on my hole, I fight and pull away and even if it makes it in, it's not going beyond the very tip before it's pushed out. It strikes me as a delayed reaction - by 20+ years' delay - because I don't remember ever fighting him off; maybe I couldn't then, but can now? So bottoming is out, which is fine, because I like to top. But then, no matter how much I want it, I start thinking about my perp and wonder if he felt or thought the same way I feel and think in this moment. And immediately the bone is gone, my interest is gone, and I feel a tremendous amount of shame and guilt. It's not something I've figured out how to ignore or control, and I'm unaware of any clinics where one can try out fucking in a controlled environment. So where does that leave me?
In therapy I learned to identify and label feelings, worked on that complex mess of feeling guilty that carries over from childhood to adulthood, and simple talking about the trauma that never goes away. Yet nowhere did we cover the basics of How To Be Intimate As An Adult If You Were Fucked Over As A Kid. I know that a lot of people with similar backgrounds find drugs and alcohol to be intimacy cheerleaders, and more than once I've thought about trying it just to see if there's a difference, but I resist giving in like that. I think I'm afraid I'd lose control. Maybe that's the root of the issue.
To the monastery a guy like me must go. A monastery of one, methinks.
