ARCHIVE 03.15.2022
A couple weeks prior to my birthday (which was yesterday), I wrote a list of things I wanted to do for it: get a haircut; hike with my pup; get a lymphatic drainage massage for inflammation; delete Hinge; start muay thai again; start writing again; have great sex; buy an air fryer.
I deleted Hinge and got my haircut last week. But, yesterday, the rest of my grand reset plans went awry when I woke up depressed as hell. I took my pup out to potty, fed him, then went straight back to sleep.
I had therapy today and cried. We spoke about my birthday, solitude versus loneliness, my fucked up life and resulting fucked up perspectives, financial illiteracy, my best friend’s upcoming death anniversary, and.. serial fucking.
I really love sex (after a lifetime of hating it), but I don’t think sex can erase the things I feel. It’s become an escape, just another drug; I’m constantly thinking about it, constantly searching for it, and when I have it I still want more. I think all I really want is to be held. To be cuddled and coddled and told that everything is going to be ok.
Today in the grocery store, an older woman kept staring at me in the produce section by the mangoes. I thought she was going to tell me off for something. Finally she was like, “You’re cute. You look cute.” gesturing at my up-do-bangs-mask combo. My fear quickly melted into a relieved gratitude. I told her I’d just gotten bangs and thanked her, a smile waxing to full beneath my mask. In the parking lot my friend asked if that happened to me often. It didn’t. Not from old ladies anyway.
I just got home from being held tight. No sex. My request. He told me endearingly that I’m fucked up, but that I’m gonna be fine. That I am much better off than he was at my age, and that my life is just beginning.
I told myself in the car yesterday that I haven’t yet done what I’m supposed to do on this earth, so I can’t leave yet. But God knows it hurts to stay.
ARCHIVE 03.19.2022
Spent my Friday night reading my friend’s old blogs, inadvertently training myself to refrain from being an offended-by-everything millennial when I read, sometimes flinchingly, of their twisted sexual fantasies (and realities) that tickle the brim of aberrant ephebophilic misogynistic sex addiction.
But. I know a lot of people think and act in this way. These are valid human thoughts and actions — not saying they’re right or wrong, but they are real. I 1000% was interested in flirting with much older men in my teens. Not trying to normalize this, just saying it’s a real thing that really happens. So me acting shocked at this person’s real accounts of similar situations would be ironic. Shit.. my own self-hatred, self-sexual-objectification, and suicidal tendencies could qualify me as misogynistic too.
We’ve all had fucked up upbringings (admittedly or not), and we all have some fucked up desires, fantasies, and experiences that we wouldn’t share with anyone. And all of us addicts (sex or otherwise) have addictions and compulsions that exacerbate rather than ease the shit that caused the hurt in the first place. The difference is — this person writes and talks about them openly (albeit under a pseudonym); just a human being completely honest about being human.
No doubt my friend’s more ribald entries (of which there are many) would cause 99% of people to be offended and outraged and think this person’s an insufferable miscreant because people aren’t nearly as compassionate or open-minded as they like to believe. But when I feel between their lines and peer beyond their ostensibly mangled mind, I know there lies a delicate person that has merely responded to life in the best ways they knew how. And maybe they weren’t the best ways, but they knew no better.
One particular post I came across proved my between-the-line assumptions correct — it exhibited the other extreme of their encounters: something less lascivious, more romantic. Something gentle, something fragile. A longing, a losing, all too familiar.
I know my friend’s writing may come off crude, but to me it’s just honest. I know it is, because I can relate to it, so it must be real. We’re similar. We fuck and we fucked and we fucked up when we fell in love. We love sex but we want love but we fall in love with the wrong people. It’s hard to love healthily when you’re used to fucking toxically.
I crave something deep, something lasting, something stimulating but not addicting. Something slow, something vulnerable, something less chaotic than I’m used to, less destructive than I’m used to. What I’m used to is causing my p***y to work overtime and my brain to work undertime, causing my callous to thicken and my heart to deteriorate. I have to go to therapy to remind myself of the parts of me I’ve numbed and neglected.
The only thing consistent about my dating is my compulsion to date. First dates have ranged from: meeting on the upper deck of the Ralphs parking lot and talking in my car for five hours; meeting at the Silver Lake meadow at 1130pm in the midst of winter to smoke cigarettes and talk about addiction, capitalism, and chipped teeth; meeting at a dark cozy bar then wildly fondling each other, blacked out, in his pick up truck to wrap up the night; meeting at a dive bar and getting social on whiskey, chain-smoking, then retiring to his home atop a hill to fall asleep cuddling then wake up to fresh fruit and a cig with a view; a game of yahtzee, some stiff hot toddies, and a stiff cock; a dirt bike ride to a secret makeout spot in the hills; a movie then a drunken night at the strip club followed by a cool down at the beach; a motorcycle lesson then back to his for tea; going birdwatching and grocery shopping — there are so many more.
These dates seem to vary vastly, but really they’re just weird permutations of one another. On the surface they’re different, but there is a common thread that underlies all of them — the fact that I’m still dating as an escape from myself rather than as an opportunity to discover more of myself. Dating is fun, sure, but it’s also exhausting. Is it modern dating in general? Or is it dating in LA specifically? Either way, I find myself having to delete dating apps and retreat from the outside world pretty regularly.
The apps are too easy. And so am I.
Full grown adults are binge-watching the horniest high school tv shows, and then we get mad at them for being horny over teens. Life’s a fucking set up. It’s no different than the hypocrisy of Big Industries that create both the cause and the cure. We set ourselves up. The concepts of moral and immoral, right and wrong, are too deeply mingled. Society has been rendered confused and fucked up, with no one to blame but ourselves. Humans are twisted, existing is insane, and we’re doing our best.
Do you periodically take breaks from dating, dating apps, and sex?