My addiction to guilt is boring me to death. Such boredom will wear away at me until I am nothing but an enervated, fleshless assortment of bones, like the hot American cowboys who get sucked dry by the Mummy in…The Mummy. Other forms of self-destruction may be more cinematic — of course Danny Boyle and Darren Aranofsky would mine more visual magic out of heroin addiction than the slow soul-erosion of Ashkenazi misery.
If you are a fellow “sister from the desert,” or come from a background involving forced emigration, pogroms, ancestors who starved so that you wouldn’t have to, “old country” mythology refracted through warped retellings, emotional incest, grooming, borderline personality disorder or rampant divorce, you kind of get the drill. In this line of thinking, life is in fact not for living, but for dreading; we who become martyrs do so not to redeem the human race, but to validate our parents’ endless martyrdom, and their parents’ and so on.
In less than a month, I’ll be 33, the age of both Pfeiffer and Kravitz when they played Catwoman. And yet, as my brilliant Akashic reader Kat said to me, I still haven’t lived for myself. Every morning, I turn on my phone with a pang of terror, fearful of how I’ve compromised myself the day before, what plans I’ve said yes to without thinking, how some trickster in the past has once again laid mines for future-me to step into. The usual patterning ensures: working too much on weekends; no time or energy for sex and spontaneity; social plans which I have neither the money nor interest for, but which I will not cancel out of a profound fear of disappointing/angering anyone else.
Look, you’ve all heard this story a thousand times: Weeks before my Bar Mitzvah, my long-divorced parents announced to me that on Saturday night, they would each throw their own party. Now that I was an adult, I could choose which I’d attend. Typing this now, all I can think is: who cares? So what? I live in the most exciting city in the world, where, by the graces of Venus, I actually have friends and lovers. And yet, it always gets to be too much.
Must I keep running to some Mediterranean hideout every time, to reconstitute myself? There must be another way, beyond feeling like I can only take shape in the darkroom, or else burn out as a relational pinball, hurled from one interaction to the next, losing my soul with every impact, exhausted, subsumed, decimated and ultimately voided of any selfhood.
Stick with me here, because this is connected — for me, the best part about cruising for sex is the calm. The weather is balmy, you’re not in a rush to get anywhere or see anyone, the day is yours for walking around, seeing who catches your eye, and discovering what they smell like. It’s ambient, liquid time, with no beginnings or endings, and it takes a sincere effort to cultivate! To hunt, and not feel hunted; to sip, and not starve; to feel curiosity, and not panic.
There is a chance, if all goes according to plan, that this may be the first summer in human history in which I’ve had visible abs, a miracle which could defy my genetic legacy, and change…pretty much no real aspect of my life, worldview or emotional state.
But I will be damned if I waste the Prime of Miss David Odyssey grinding away in a gulag of guilt and obligation. I’d rather become a sphinx, a mystery, or a legend — “nobody sees her around much anymore” — than stay in this state of ubiquitous hyper-availability, everywhere for everyone, yet nobody to myself. I will find a way to show up for the relationships in my life and stay open to new ones, while asserting that nobody is entitled to me automatically.
Naturally, I’ve said this before, and, after years of therapy and recovery, I still have no idea quite how I’m going to start this authentic life. But here are some possible new rules:
PSYCHIC DEFENSES: Doubling down on protection, purification, grounding, soul-retrievals and aura sealing. Right now, I feel like an empathic-somatic bluetooth device — ready to be paired, used and disregarded by anyone in the immediate vicinity.
WORK & SLEEP: The advent of a book pitch has yielded a laser-sharp focus, and an intensely committed practice. To do this, need to sleep 10 hours a night and set off large swaths of the day not just for writing, but for recovering from writing. I pray to integrate this purified form of process into so-called normal life.
SAYING ‘NO:’ We actually have little data on this foreign concept. What is it? Allegedly, in normal human society, if one says ‘no’ to an invitation or social engagement, they won’t be annihilated or made to feel responsible for the emotional instability of everyone else involved. The human race will not instantly perish. Again, this is not something which I have experienced, but have only heard about from well-regulated gentiles. Any accounts on this one are welcome.
DANCING: Long ago, I declared that to feel alive and in my body, I needed to dance at least once a week. What the hell happened to that imperative? Is it because New York is so big, and I get to lazy to cross boroughs just for the right music? Whatever. Get my ass on a dance floor. The rest is easy.
MORE SEX: Why am I having a hard time penciling this in? Why else bother being alive? What could I be doing that’s more important?
For now, all I have is this testimony, and you as my witness. Maybe that’s enough.
Ever,
David Odyssey