Sunday Confessionals : Secrets

Image found HERE

I have a confession, I am my mother’s daughter. I have a terrible temper and a tendency to be flaky and unreliable. For me love is an addiction, an obsession, a have to have. I am dramatic and childish in the best and worst possible ways. I am generous to a fault. I am afraid of my ambition, of earning money, of losing myself in a life without passion. I lack confidence and self-esteem. I don’t recognize my value. I feel guilty for everything and that makes me really hard to talk to. I cry easily and often and I don’t know if I am being manipulative or if I am just feeling vulnerable. I try to save people even at the expense of my own personal safety and well-being. I am hysterical. Open. Playful. Unstable. Innocent. I worry too much. I am aggressively protective. I can’t stand to see other people suffer, particularly children and animals. I am wise beyond my years. I am my mother’s counselor and also her mother. I am empathetic. I am my own worst nightmare. I complicate everything. I am gullible and adorable. I am competitive but I never win. I know what you want before you do. If you ask me a question I will bare my soul but I will never answer your question because I don’t know what I think or feel or who I am deep down. I accept everything, even the contradictions. I am psychopomp and a psychic. I exist more in dreams than in reality.

–

I am my father’s daughter. From him I learned that my value comes from outside of myself. Men are the ones who assign value and meaning to my life. My survival depends on my ability to accommodate and please my partner. I can’t live on my own. I am an object. I am fragile. I am defiant. I am an anarchist. I abhor mediocrity. I am paranoid and pessimistic and sometimes I compensate for feelings of unworthiness with excessive pride. I am a crippled genius. I am an unlocker of doors some of which ought to remain closed. I am an instigator. A Devil’s advocate. I will bring out the best and the worst in you. I am a recluse desperate for attention. I am possessive and jealous. I run wild. I like mysteries. I solve people like puzzles. I look in dark places. I am voracious and relentless. I am timid. I am a monster slayer. I am also a monster. I continue to gaslight myself and second guess all my choices. I am a failure. Not because of the mistakes I have made but because I give up before I even begin. Humiliation is the worst of all feelings. I am as big as a universe and as small as a seed. I have demon blood. I am more animal than man. I have an inferiorly complex as deep as the ocean. I am bottomless. I am terrified all the time. I don’t know how to be happy. I have an intensity which others find both alarming and alluring. I am both asexual and hyper-sexual and that’s probably a result of repeated sexual abuse which is to say I don’t know the true state of my sexuality. I am always fighting against myself, society, the man. For me surrender is synonymous with death. I am a revolutionary without a cause. I am a window painted over and nailed shut. I am black and white. I can smell blood in the water. I know your weaknesses. I see your strengths. My words are like razors. I am loved but I don’t know it. I make excuses. I brag. I have seen too much. I am scarred all the way through. I see man for what he is both good and bad. I don’t care if our beliefs differ. I am a drowning man. I have a head full of stories. I don’t know how to speak to people out loud. I say the wrong things. I am impulsive. I don’t hit children. I think animals are better people than people are.

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Mindlovemisery's Menagerie

For me Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie is my Brothel of Slaking Intellectual Lusts. For those of you familiar with the 90s computer game Planescape Torment this reference might mean something, for the rest of you it probably won’t make much sense so let me explain. The word brothel is misleading. It might be more accurate to call it a philosophical school, poetry being what it is to the soul. For me it is a sanctuary, a place to expand the mind and heart, to explore the sensual, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual realms, a place where inspiration and creativity combine with freedom of expression. It is a place where people can be themselves and form meaningful connections with others through the artistic medium of their choice, at least, I hope it is that kind of place. When I first started MLMM I never imagined that so many people would come together to assist…

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Hair Emergency

I need help with a very disgusting issue.

About 2 months ago I decided to try the no shampoo approach (I absolutely do not recommend it, the dangers are grossly understated). Before going the no shampoo route I was washing my hair every 7-10 days. My hair produced very little by way of natural oils originally. It never smelled. It always felt clean. I have coarse, plentiful, wavy/curly hair. For every hair follicle I have 2 to 4 hairs so I just have a lot of hair. I was using organic products, no sulfate blah blah but it was getting super expensive. Anyhow since I started my hair has started to produce some mysterious substance. It is a very solid fat, it is not oil. This fat is not well distributed through the hair and I cannot get it evenly distributed brushing, combing, massaging, ignoring nothing works. This substance collects massive amounts of dirt and so my hair is absolutely, disgustingly filthy 10 minutes after a wash. It does not smell bad thankfully, my roommate is non stop sniffing my head so I guess it has a nice scent but the hair is so gross. Despite being covered in lard my hair is still frizzy and coarse. My scalp is not irritated at all. No itching or redness. My scalp feels pretty good so it does not seem like the follicles are clogged. I have tried now washing my hair with shampoo but it does not help. I cannot find anything that will break down this substance. It can’t be product build up because I wasn’t using products so what is there to build up? I have been working around trees a lot, maybe I have sap mixed with oil or something? How do I get out sap? Lard? Will it be necessary to shave my head? Is this just how normal hair is? It can’t be that awful, I would rather have horse hair as before if this is what hair feels like. Do I have a disease? I have seen no improvement at all in my hair. It certainly looks and feels worse. Because of the grease it is even harder than before to get wet. I have oddly very waterproof hair, like a duck or something. I have to submerge my head for a long time and it still never gets fully wet.

Oneness

I feel around

in the darkness

for your hand.

Heart to palm

I hold you hostage,

make you feel

the echoes inside of me,

the oneness

which cannot be divided,

the oneness

which is us.

–

At night

we are two

warm bodies

woven together

on the edge of dreams.

Sometimes I lie awake

just so I can

hear your expectations

break apart.

–

Prayers

don’t always

come

in the form

of a wish.

Sometimes

they come

like fire

burning away

the inessential,

turning us over

so we can see

the world

as angels do

from above

and below

at the same time.

–

When you speak

to bare your soul

your voice

is as quiet

as a cat

and I never really know

if your promises

will keep.

Still I choose

to believe.

–

Your soul

weighs less than mine

because you have

memories of childhood

and all I have

are memories of survival,

memories too expensive

to revisit,

memories which come upon me

uninvited like a war.

–

You say “I love you”

with the shape

of your mouth

and your eyes

like two tremulous satellites

dancing in water

and I can almost believe

that I am worth it.

Patreon Account

I created a Patreon account. I will be posting some poetry/stories there. I don’t intend to charge for anything (I am not 100 percent sure how it works though) but there should be an option for donating. Is anyone else using Patreon? If I add exclusive member content does their need to be an associated cost? I want it to be totally voluntary. I would like to use the donations (if there are any) to submit to magazines.

Become a Patron!

How do you “human”?

What I am about to write to you is deeply personal and also humiliating.

As many of you know, I moved recently. I am currently living with a male friend in the Northern part of Sweden. I had hoped to start a relationship with him. I have tried to start a relationship with him and sometimes it seems as if we are in a relationship already. We’ve been living together for about a month now. We share a bed. We often sleep naked together. We’ve kissed. We’ve done many different sexual things but we have not had penetrative sex. Despite frequent erections and a lot humping (humping he initiates) he does not want to have penetrative sex with me. Despite telling me he loves me and spending hours and hours a day with me and alluding occasionally to marriage he has no romantic interest in me whatsoever. I have never met anyone like this and so it’s been really hard for me to understand that he just doesn’t have “feelings” for me. I still don’t understand. Realistically given all the opportunities and my clearly indicating a desire for sex the fact that we haven’t yet means only one thing: He doesn’t want to have sex with me and if he doesn’t want to under these conditions he’s never going to want it. He’s just not attracted to me. Sometimes he says he is very interested in me (the whole me) and sometimes he expresses that he just doesn’t see me in that way. He loves me but he’s not in love with me. He’s not going to fall in love with me like they do in rom coms. I know that at some point I am going to have to put myself out there and start dating. I am obviously hoping to find a partner who has both sexual and romantic interest in me. I had that in my marriage but it seems impossible that lightning should strike the same person twice. The problem is that for me, given my feelings, I am not able to see him as just a friend and I cannot even fathom the pain of him dating when he finally meets someone. He has been really supportive through a very difficult time in my life and I have been impossible and crazy lately. I don’t want to lose him and the beautiful friendship we’ve created but knowing myself I will just keep setting myself up for rejection again and again. I will just keep hoping. How do I navigate this situation? How do I get my sexual needs met in a way that doesn’t compromise my heart too much? Masturbation just isn’t enough I want that human connection. I also want that emotional connection and a relationship which can evolve and deepen and potentially lead to marriage. There were so many wonderful things about being married about being in a very close relationship with another person. I miss that. Is that wrong?

Objet Petit A

Objet Petit (A)utre literally translates to “tiny object of otherness”. It is not generally the person themselves that you desire (although it is perceived as such) but a quality that you perceive that person to possess which you find lacking or absent within yourself. You feel that you need them. You feel like you can’t function without them. You are obsessed. In order to acquire the desired quality for yourself you must possess and control the other person. In practice though this doesn’t work because you can’t possess a person much less their qualities (qualities you assign to them). What you really need to do is identify those qualities so that you can nurture them within yourself.

I prefer this term to infatuation when describing the unhealthy addictive nature of certain connections because I think it is quite normal to feel strong emotions at the onset of a new relationship and I don’t think all infatuations turn into obsessions/addictions. I also think this term really puts it into perspective, the sooner you can disconnect the obsessive feelings from the person the better. It is not really about the other person anyways.

I wrote a post a few days ago(?) stating that I was emotionally invested in someone but if it were only love (pure and sweet) I wouldn’t be in this chronic state of neediness.

I haven’t quite identified the specific quality that I wish to possess. I suspect it is the combination of extroversion and eccentricity. The courage to stand for something, to state one’s own opinions even at the risk of causing others some discomfort.

It’s odd because I never saw this man as perfect. The “illusion” it seems is not one of “perfection”. For me the imperfections have always been more compelling anyhow. For me I guess the illusion is in the desire to be everything to one person and vice versa.

In reading about how to recover from an unhealthy infatuation I learned something

It’s not the other person who gives us good feelings, a sense of purpose, or self-worth. We give these things to ourselves. We assign people “specialness” and in order to be special we must get the attention of a special person but they are human same as us and that specialness again is a designation which we have created and assigned to them. Even when a person is no longer present in our life all the good bits you experienced from the connection are still very much alive within you. You are that which you seek, in other words.

Relationship Adjacent

Dear Diary,

I’ll break my heart as many times as it takes. My words. To live, we’ve got to die a little each day. To risk a little each day. To give and receive. To connect. Does a broken heart always hurt? Can it be healed? Can it be made whole again? Should we sew on the old, atrophied bits of ourselves or trust that we will grow healthy new flesh in time? I keep sewing the rotten bits back on and then I ask myself silly questions like why does it hurt so much? Why do my wounds keep getting infected? Why does it hurt every time I breathe? So maybe it is okay to have pieces missing sometimes. Maybe a heart can grow back.

I am emotionally invested in someone. It is a parody of a relationship. It’s a relationship which camouflages and masquerades and assumes a different level of meaning/significance every day. It’s CHAOS. It’s real. It isn’t real. It’s reality adjacent? Get me? If you don’t understand then YOU ARE NOT listening. Sorry. Yes where was I? I am emotionally invested in someone. He loves me. He loves me not. You know the deal.

You know what hurts the most? Resistance. My own resistance to a person, a situation, my emotional states. I’m a fighter/a survivor. I’m strong. I am also lonely and panic-driven. I am fleeting, mood based. A phenomena. As humans we make things solid through definition. Freedom sounds beautiful but freedom is soft and vulnerable. And if observation tells me anything people don’t want to be soft and vulnerable. Maybe what we really want is a luxury prison cell.

We are all connected. To each other. To the planet. To the universe. You get it? I sometimes think there are no individuals at all just a kind of ubiquitous hunger. People tell me I should set boundaries. I have tried to set boundaries but boundaries make me feel constricted and small. I want to explore. To invade other countries. Countries being people. I want to know everything there is about being human and I can’t very well learn everything there is if I have a wall between myself and everyone I encounter. Maybe boundaries aren’t walls, maybe they are bridges. I don’t understand. Enlighten me.

I have always felt that in order to be worthy of love I needed to accommodate my partner’s needs, however unreasonable and repress my own. I am too stubborn to really give myself totally over to the will of another and yet I never quite manage to find my own voice either. I end up living in a weird kind of limbo. Not quite myself. Not quite somebody else. Not enough of this or that. Too much of the wrong things. I am clingy, especially at the beginning. For some reason that surprises me every time I enter a new relationship. It doesn’t even have to be a romantic relationship but it’s definitely more intense when there is some romantic interest. I only have one romantic interest but he is kind of infuriating, kind of sweet.

I sometimes wonder if I can be myself in a relationship, any relationship. If the desire to fight/resist and the desire to please might not just be too strong within me. There’s a war inside of me. A hunger which cannot be fed or starved. A hunger like a void. A hunger which is both there and not there at the same time. A hunger which is probably born of self-rejection. That dreadful state which keeps me vacillating between panic and delirium.

The more I think about relationships the less I seem to know for certain. I fed my marriage and my husband starved. I guess maybe I am like celery by the time you work through all the fibrous bits (survivor’s skin) you’ve depleted your energy reserves. I don’t mean to be so difficult but I am difficult to know, to love. I am not unlovable, I am just resistent.

The thing is deep down maybe I don’t want a relationship but a childhood. I want to go on adventures. I want to have a single person be the totality of my existence when present. I want to crawl under the covers with a flashlight and talk in excited whispers for hours about beautiful and terrifying things. Things I have never spoken out loud before. Minimal censorship. Free. I want to be innocent. To feel innocent  I want something playful. Volatile. Creative.

I want to touch another person as if I didn’t know what it meant to empty one body into another. I want to be organic. Orgasmic with life. To have reality and fantasy permeate my being at the same moment. I want to discover a person and take them whole even the parts I can’t really fit into my life but I am scared. I have so many memories of rejection, of heartache, of loss. So when I am with someone I think of all the ways I might lose them and then I am not so much with them as I am against the clock, against a whole history of personal failures and character flaws, and faulty belief systems (theirs and mine). That’s not how I want to be. How I want to feel. I want to be open and curious. I want to enjoy myself. Freedom scares me I guess.

Maybe I just want a friend I can touch. A savior. A sentient teddy bear. A provider. A stalker. A mentor. A therapist. An admirer. A playmate. A lover. A priest. A partner. An interrogator. A sloppy crush. The love of my life. A twin. A spouse. A madman without criminal tendencies. All the things I should want and all the things a strong woman should never want much less say out loud.

Surprise Prompt

I want you to write about what freedom means to you. Do you feel free to express your beliefs/life philosophy, creative genius, opinions, feelings, sexuality/gender identity, authenticity etc.? Was there ever a time when you did not speak out against injustice but should have? Was there ever a time when you felt that your personal freedoms were restricted in anyway? What if any limits do you think there should be concerning freedom of expression? What improvements would you like to see within your own community?

Let’s Talk About Love

The definition of love has been warped by some to mean addiction, obsession, lust, infatuation. My dad defined love as ownership and dominion. For years that was the only definition I had of love and so for me love was something to be avoided and feared. When I was 6 interviewing my neighbors I saw what love could be. I saw a healthy relationship built on growth, loyalty, compassion, curiosity, and mutual respect. I found a new definition for love. A better definition. I believe that love is something we create within ourselves and that a relationship is something we create together with others. We don’t have to recreate or reenact the scripts passed down to us from childhood. It’s time to ditch the script altogether. A script has a beginning and an end. It locks us into a particular role. It is static. It binds. Create a dynamic relationship one that can evolve rather than bind/enslave yourself to another, seek to connect. Connection is a conscious act. A choice. Connection frees us to be who we are in the moment. Connection not only gives us the space to grow, it encourages us to grow in positive ways. It gives us energy. It wakes us up.You lose yourself in addiction, in obsession, in lust, in infatuation, in the hunt to possess and dominate. In love you discover new aspects of yourself, the best parts of yourself, as well as the false, toxic beliefs acquired during your lifetime. Love is light. Love is fresh air. Love is pure, uncontaminated water. Love is nutrition for the soul.

As children (and then later as adults) we sometimes believe that there’s a finite amount of love. A withholding, unaccountable parent that offers little in the way of time, guidance/understanding/commitment, and attention can make us feel insignificant, small, jealous/envious of those people, beliefs, and activities which appear to be monopolizing their attention. This isn’t proof that love is limited, only that human beings are sometimes hindered in their ability to form deep, meaningful connections. A parents inability to form a meaningful connection with a child is because they haven’t yet formed a meaningful connection with themselves, it’s through no fault or lacking in the child. It’s because the parent is seeking to create love from the outside in. Love comes from the inside and radiates outward. Our capacity to love grows as we learn how better to connect with ourselves and to integrate those aspects of ourselves which we have rejected/abandoned in positive, creative, and compassionate new ways.