* * *
Physical symptoms of this drug are preventing me from feeling as good as I otherwise might. They are terrible. Writing with a pen: it is hard. Optimism has trouble propelling me anywhere when I cannot bear to be in my own body and I cannot stop touching my face. I’m most pessimistic about being the sort of ineffectual loser who cannot live without tweaking. I know this from the clarity it has given me.
Seems so foolish to force stimulation upon a self that is legitimately lacking it. I don’t get what I want from the life I’ve chosen, but there are other lives. Maybe caffeine pills can do until later. Maybe I don’t have to live a life that leaves me feeling constrained and anxious and stifled.
* * *
Tried to cancel on a dinner with Freida last night but she told me, collect yourself, confirm with me in half an hour; I want to see you.
* * *
I have been feeling better, alive, and moved this week. There is a returned pleasure. There is a returned tone of pleasure that in depression I forget the feeling of. It is: that things are surprising and mysterious, and that I could happen to come upon some new or fascinating thing at any time. Sensual pleasures are of extreme value to me. I love soft lighting. I love psychedelic and strangely patterned music. I love being on the brink of focus, and I can feel it coming. I really can feel it! I don’t know how to get this state back when I am unhappy, but you know what? I won’t worry.
I don’t have a desire to be dulled any longer like I did. I can return to a productive state without feeling as though I’m overbrimming or losing control of myself. I am changing what relationships I put my trust in, and who I’m willing to love. I am losing my desire to be with people to whom I cannot truly explain myself. Or I’ve lost it. I trust myself in ever a different way and my internal life has changed. Now it is a matter of rebuilding my external life to match it.
Like my body, in better shape than ever, I have to train my mind so that it’s mine again. Focus isn’t easy. It’s a skill; it’s trainable; you have to practise it. It gets better; you can lose it. I’ve been blessed to have focus and fascination in life. It’s made me lucky to learn what I already have. All I want is to give myself that gift again. I am an enterprise of what I know. Don’t worry about lost time: there’s plenty left. No one can see the years you’ve lived badly.
Guide and direct: heart rate; attention. It’s the only expectation I have from life.
There is a time for feeling pain, hurt, and victimization, but your contract with that victimhood cannot last. How are you to be recognized for your pain? How can someone know it or speak to it? You can choose your friends but living permanently under the sign of distrust will give you little. What if I veered slightly back toward another story I’ve told myself—that I am hardened, stable, untouchable? It doesn’t even matter if it’s not true; I can still cling to it. This fiction might do more for me than its opposite. I can still be open and empathetic. I can still profit from all the valuable things vulnerability has taught me without kneeling before the earth as an always-wounded person. To consider oneself resilient is an important step toward actual resilience. It doesn’t matter what people have done to you. They hardly know anything about it. You are responsible for the future of what you let into your life.
* * *
There’s a reason I’m continually attracted to men who I see as at once constraining and rejecting. Obviously, I guess. It’s this qualification held away from you—never unconditional, never welcoming, always with an expectation. I think that by vying after the acceptance of someone I find rigid, I’ll find consistency in how I make myself for them. I’ll be a kind of person. I’ll have focus. I’ll be focused. I’ll make myself meet a gaze that, for all its faults, is at least comprehensible.
All summer, and some fall, went to either of two siblings: a screen before the world. Now I’m lost to both, for a period or for always. Who is here to witness me? And who will pay me visits so I don’t have to leave my apartment for it to happen?
* * *
The true problem of my life is not a romantic one, it’s that my brain is fried to fuck. Depression expresses itself to me as, primarily, a lack of concentration, but I don’t have to be depressed to suffer this. I have completely lost the battle with concentration. It takes so much effort to stay with something for more than a couple moments before refreshing something on my phone. My fear, my loneliness, my boredom express themselves and find their homes in this flailing inattention. Depression has lifted the injunction to stick to anything off my shoulders. It has released me from the pressure of self-imposed expectation! I’ve reached, through depression, a momentary calm in mental collapse.
What else: feeling a little horny for spring but being unsure who could satisfy it (after asking Paul, who just got out of a relationship, and asking Oreste, who is currently in California), I installed Tinder on my telephone to procure prospects for dating or sex. It gave me for some days an optimistic feeling, surprising at the outset, that there was in fact a whole world of available men for me—men of all sorts: attractive, fit, possibly even well-to-do or not so encumbered by negativity. I thought, look at all these! I liked to swipe yes with some of them and chat with a freedom and ease rarely characteristic of my speech with anyone I’ve already met. The excitement hardly lasted. Went on two dates. Unlike an earlier set-up I had this winter, I had a generous feeling toward both of them. I slept with one, two nights ago, the first time I’ve slept with anyone since the holidays. But I did not care. He was tall, slim, and handsome, with nice, thick black hair and a very nice dick, but: I did not care. He lauded my sexual skill and I think it’s strange to put it this way. I felt nothing during. He did not go down on me, which is surprising for someone trying to make a good impression on another in order for the option of more sex to follow (he texted for another session the very next evening!). There is just nothing magical about being penetrated by a person who means nothing to me, who represents nothing to me, even if he is good-looking. And, whatever: charming, lighthearted, seemed kind, smelled of vetiver (I asked). But who cares!
Really, it’s just that earlier romantic figures have made me feel so worried about being abandoned that I’ve wanted to turn away Oreste when he’s home, but I love Oreste when he’s home, and I don’t have anyone else for whom I feel the way I feel for him. Saying no to Oreste will not put a new person I want to be nude with in my life. I want him when he’s here. I just have to remember softness, gratefulness, and kindness to us both. Not every action is an investment! I was compartmentalized when younger, but it wasn’t all a lie. It was often a utility to me! Sex is not this other thing I do, in another life, which I can get from people I wouldn’t otherwise wish to spend time with. It’s a special way of relating to privileged people in life whose privilege needn’t mean permanence or demand. It’s childish that I should forbid from myself something I love because I cannot control how much I’d prefer to have it whenever I wanted. I was better at shutting off those desires when I was younger. Could I have a feeling of separateness back but feel close to myself, too? That would be the sweet spot.
Ah, distractions.
* * *
I feel a perpetual lack of safety, as though there is some thing I’ll give up by living wrong. I don’t have anything to worry about. These have been a stagnant few months. I sacrificed a year of school. I did little. And I considered that “self-care” should be what puts you back on the track of your responsibilities and goals, but perhaps if you are feeling sometimes suicidal, one’s duty of care to oneself may just be to keep the body living.
I am meant to work. But I can’t work, I can’t think straight enough to work. How am I to write? Constantly, and with a constant failure to produce. Every industry, including those of art, culture, and knowledge production, transforms itself into a market of misery with exhausted, self-hating, labour-obsessed producers fighting over the fantasy of limited space made real by their
inability to focus themselves upon objects they don’t imagine as venerated. This last thing is particular to cultural production. An industry founded upon innumerable hours spent on wasted surplus in search of some correct object. Then that very labour is venerated. The misery itself is venerated! The participants in cultural production trust and love the ethic that makes their lives into shit, and they uphold it fervently! Misery sustained on stupid logic of people’s supposed capacity for discrimination: if it weren’t necessary, I wouldn’t submit to it. Well.
You don’t lose anything by going more slowly or taking a pause. Protracted adolescence is no problem as long as you don’t have kids of your own to raise.
* * *
My course union had our spring social earlier this weekend and, since there was a time cap on the free drinks, I did not get drunk. One classmate, Marianne, was there. She has her mind usually on sex, and her speech usually on sex, and everything has to end there. I left this party to go to one at Freida’s, and when I left, Maurice, Morgan, and Marianne were in conversation. Maurice told me later he had some friends waiting at his house but didn’t invite her, and I thought, how foolish! But, he said, she hit on me! Everything had to rush to the sex place; little but certain things like she touched his arm a few times too many or she said to him, buy me a drink! I like when men force me to drink!
Marianne complained to me, before I left, women tend not to like me. Young women with other ways to act out do not like her. I totally like Marianne, as I tell her and later tell Maurice, because I feel I understand her. I tell him that I suspect hypersexuality is just Marianne’s way of working out her power and her powerlessness, and that she’s young, and it’s likely to be something she feels less of a compulsion toward later in her twenties. He says, it’s so prominent for her, the sexual obsession, how could she replace it with anything else? But sex isn’t its own discrete category. Sex is just the fantasy of the most intense, direct, and concentrated relation. To want to have sex with everyone is not this special way of wanting everyone—it’s just to try to speed up and intensify a relationship in a measurable way. It is to claim the control of another that you are willing to relinquish on your own behalf. It’s a contract to be momentarily both generous and greedy, and so often a contract to scatter the moment it is over. Anything that climaxes: you can tell when it’s done.
I suspect, as one grows, the need to bring everything to its climax recedes, and along with it the need to give yourself up and have it filled with someone else’s self-offering. There are quieter, softer, and less certain ways of being with others.
* * *
Ivan has been in Moscow doing his Russian improvement and Russian socializing. We have a completely unfocused way of communicating with one another. By volume, it fluctuates less based on our level of friendly attachment than by how much we have to share. He’ll write long emails because novel things are happening where he is, and I’ll write tiny ones with links to things I’m reading. I like my friendship with Ivan, which is non-invasive and free of expectation. It’s a weird friendship because of how free I feel to have him around the apartment. He might sublet my room this summer, if I’m away. He’s chosen to do his PhD at NYU in the fall (against offers from Northwestern, Princeton, and Stanford).
* * *
I’ve spent less time, over the past couple of days, thinking of Oreste’s return than of Ivan’s. We sometimes suggest casually over email that Ivan may live in my apartment whether or not I’m in the city over the summer, and it will be like summer camp. I never think of having sex with Ivan but I like having him around. With Ivan I have someone with whom I can share things in whatever circumstance, who’s eager, too, to tell things to me. I don’t know why I feel so comfortable having him here when most people make me feel pressured or annoyed. I like how comfortable I am being unadorned before him. I think a sexless live-in partner for the summer would be fun. The right one, Ivan, would be fun.
* * *
For the second time in a couple of months, I’ve felt a lot of pressure on my heart and extreme tightness in my chest, and not during activity or any circumstance where it would make sense to feel anxiety. My grandfather died of an expanding heart? I only learned this recently through my mother’s parents, but I don’t believe my father would give up an opportunity to tell me his own father died because his heart was too big.
* * *
Oreste did come over on his first night back, and it was nice. Relationships, perhaps, may feel just as easy as you allow them to. He was gone, touring. It was comfortable and easy though we hadn’t seen each other in three months. I tend toward a certain deliberate (usually sexual) explicitness, which he doesn’t love, vis-à-vis written interpersonal communication. But talking is always easy when we’re together. We were almost discussing each other as stable figures in each other’s lives. By almost, I mean—it was his reference to me, when I told him I felt self-conscious about the ongoing sameness of my apartment, and he said it was nice, a stable base. He isn’t someone to exchange letters with, and this is a shame as I do love letters, but he’s just here (when he’s in Toronto). The few months without him allowed me to feel less moved, actually—and not in a bad way! In a way such that I feel not at all anxious. I feel less like a frightened object of his whims and more like a communicative subject with equal whims of my own. There is a point I reach with every object of infatuation where the veil lifts and they stop seeming like the end of men. They feel like one imperfect person whom chance has brought me to, whom I have developed a rapport with.
When does sex cease feeling like the sharpest form of relation? I like the feeling of safety I had two nights ago. I like the idea that we mean a lot to each other, but I know we can’t always mean a lot to each other, and I always expect that someday I’ll just discover he’s in a relationship. It’s hard to know how to behave with an itinerant who seems both to take comfort in—and also to quite quickly become bored by—any form of stability.
The feeling I love most is of an open, comfortable pliability and sensuality with the world, where days feel good and impressions do, too. And I should never feel prohibited from that. Life doesn’t have to be hard or sparing. It can have a bit of intensity all the time.
Intensity—concentration of sensation—as, actually, the only phenomenon of living to combat, in a way, time? It packs in; it can be the emphasis that doesn’t de-emphasize something else.
The last time I felt good, I just felt, sort of: love. I didn’t know for what or for whom, but I felt bloated with it and like it could be granted to anything without being spent—that is to say: exhausted. Language is meant to feel like this, too. You don’t lose anything. There is nothing ever to be lost. What I’m describing is more often described as a condition of religious devotion, so I understand the appeal. How does one fill oneself with general, benevolent, non-directed love without claiming it from God? Claim it from whatever. Claim all things good from fucking life.
* * *
Oreste is now the one to have said no. Oreste now considers that our evenings are “too intimate” for a relationship without feeling or commitment, and of course he has neither any feeling nor any interest in commitment. I can’t believe he decided this just as I came again to terms with the particular conditions of this intimate contract. I am sad to lose whatever I might have had and sad to have not been the one to make the choice. I feel the loss way. Nauseous, anxious, jittery, confused. Feel like, why the fuck can’t I be loved by these men? Feel like, how does one even achieve what they would call intimacy with those they don’t want anything from? It’s confusing, because I understand that it would feel constricting to be in a relationship with Oreste, so what do I think I want? I just wanted to fuck, longer, the only person who turned me on until he happened not to anymore.
I cried a bit at my desk at the library today. Strange that I would have. Funniest Beckett line, learned today, in prose piece next to “Fail better”: “Throw up for good.�
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There will be those who challenge a positive ethics of plenitude in your life, and you cannot let them shake the faith!
It’s unbelievable how anxious I feel at the time of a revocation. It makes me feel homeless.
* * *
There were things I forgave by thinking this was the best thing that intimacy had to offer me right now. Since I’m not in a long-term involvement where sex, trust, and time saturation are intermingled, I don’t know if it would feel as good as I felt with Oreste all the time. Is a committed romantic partnership necessarily a new kind of relation, or is it one where friendly and familial feelings are volleyed with sexual passion? I know nothing is consistent—that no attraction is consistent. I know that in good, companionate romance, periods of revulsion or boredom are still spliced in. It isn’t necessarily that you make some new feeling, right? You might just combine and dilute a few feelings you know separately from each other. So, in that case, isn’t passionate sexual attraction the thing, perhaps the best I can do? (Problem is, men seem quite certain that passionate sexual attraction is the best I can do, too!)
* * *
When I wrote Ivan about the breakup, he advocated that I adopt at least a touch of guile. “It took me years to understand you at all.” The ways in which Ivan and I are different are important to work through, and important for reminding me of the expectations of the public world, if only to show me just how much of that public world I reject outright and need to separate myself from.
Sludge Utopia Page 5