250

Despite the frequent pretense, I run what boils down to a smut blog. The point isn’t lost on me. Thus, every 50th post I like to take a moment to address a tangential ‘real’ world issue that intersects (however glancing) with issues of sexuality and depictions of desire.

Unfortunately, living just below the 45th parallel north, Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) dawns in mid-October and runs through March; instead of fighting the good fight, I’ve pretty much curled up under a rock this year.

It’s more than just SAD… I was forced out of my job mid-July. It wasn’t the best job in the world but it was the best job I’ve ever held in that 65% of it was spirit-crushing political power games and 35% of it was the most rewarding work I’ve ever done outside of social justice activism or creative endeavors. I worked with, advocated for and loved on brilliant but economically disadvantaged college students. Making their lives a little easier, pouring a little more light and bringing joy came so much closer to balancing the bullshit-to-reward ratio than I’d ever expected to find.

It did, however, present limit my abilities to explore my creative urges. I tried to look at it as a blessing in disguise when I was told to accept a ‘generous’ buyout and resign or I would be fired and get nothing.

In that I spent three weeks bouncing around between Iceland, Berlin, Amsterdam and Madrid, it was a blessing; I still haven’t completely processed the experience.

After four months of looking for a job that will pay enough to support me, allow me the time and energy I need to at least be more consistent with my photography and finding exactly fuck all; I am out of time and nearly out of money. I feel completely trapped.

This is compounded by the fact that I have never once in my life gotten anything I wanted. That sounds entitled. Let me clarify: it seems as if whenever I allow myself to admit that I want something, the universe kicks me in the face and illustrates in the most cruelly malicious fashion that wanting is the fuel on which impossibility voraciously feeds.

All the jobs I’ve ever gotten have been accidents. I’ve been in the right place at the right time and given a chance based on nothing more than abject desperation. Same with everything else except finishing college. I am not sure how that happened but I am definitely going to pay for it for the rest of my life. (I have no regrets.)

I don’t know why I’m venting all this. I don’t presume anyone does or should care. And I know it’s narcissistic that I am hijacking the venue for discussing things in the context other than insular smut criticism. But I have been feeling a degree of disingenuousness lately. I’m posting all this stuff about desire and wanting when I don’t even believe any longer that such experiences are ever mine to have again.

Truthfully, due to my continuing–and now rendered completely mysterious by the fact that a battery of extremely expensive tastes has deemed me surprisingly healthy for a late thirtysomething, high-functioning alcoholic–health issues, I pretty much figured I’d lose my job and make the most of the time I had left figuring I’d have died by this point.

But I am still here. And while yes, I may be going blind. And even if someone ever was insane enough to ever want me, maybe I’ll be so sick I can’t offer them pleasure.

As stupid as it sounds–and it sounds idiotic–the truest impetus for this blog was an effort to leave a record of the things no one wants to discuss openly but which I find so compellingly beautiful, which haunt me. That way maybe when I am gone, someone I loved deeply but was to afraid the telling would ruin everything might stumble upon it and in reading this record know how desperate I wanted to connect with them but I knew the desire to connect was not mutual–and I can’t do non-mutual. So I did this, I said in a horse whisper to secrets and silence: this is a kiss that demands no kiss-back.

And then, on Thursday, in a conversation that could have gone very badly and didn’t go at all like I expected–and I am still not at all sure what was decided by it–there was a moment when someone I love acknowledged my vulnerability and admitted her own. It was like the sanskit namaste: the spirit in me acknowledges and greets the spirit in you. Except: it was the fragileness in me acknowledges and greets the fragileness in you.

And it was like two years of unresolved anger evaporated in that moment. Like all these years I’ve been struggling to remember the name I was given but had forgotten and then in the hearing it uttered, remembering.

I want to live and I want to grow and learn–be more than less. I want to love. It’s just so bloody difficult to love the all–the good, the bad– and not the you with its good and its bad.

I’m lost but maybe you’ll find me if you are willing to look. I’m looking for you. Maybe I’ll find you, too.