Oh. It always begins with aching feeling.
Something that can only be described as a kind of melancholic detachment. Like a nostalgia for the thaw between spring and winter, when water drips from icicles clung to naked twigs, the warm morning sun touching your nose just as well as the brisk breeze. It's a feeling that aches and lingers just as stomach butterflies for a crush you're too shy to reveal, or withheld knowing the absence or unlikelihood of reciprocation.
It's not a bad feeling, necessarily... but if left lingered in your thoughts, like say during the phantom, restless hours of night when you're almost convinced the world needn't turn... it can be a sort of quiet motivator.
For me it's a debate between touch and creativity, or maybe a good cry, or maybe all three. Can I not touch myself while crying, while composing crummy prose in my skull just to scratch an itch of putting words down on a page? I never put words down on a page. I have countless stories, characters, and fantasized societal changes, that I'm too afraid, too stuck, too unmotivated to chisel away.
Instead, it's maladaptive daydreaming for me. Feeding myself the feelings of a world in which I've already succeeded. Or just picturing, scene by scene, the story play out. Only the high octane moments, the emotional payoffs. The sex. The betrayal. The witty critique of all those systems of oppression that bring me down.
So unfinished. So afraid. Always second guessing. Always judging myself before anyone else could. Never, ever to see the page, let alone your eyes, or your thoughts.
Why is this the feeling I want to touch myself to? Isn't it absurd? Pathetic? Dare I say cringe? Cringe culture is dead, I tell myself anytime I use that word. Reminded of all the people who create more freely, more brazenly than I.
But no. These are the feelings that ignite the nerves in my body. They swell my breasts and tighten inside my thighs. Maybe I'm depressed? Maybe, she says. What a fool she is. A fool, am I.
I'm reminded of a stupid story about a stupid horse. I'm unwilling to elaborate further, so just look up the etymology of "to curry favor."
Now, you're probably wondering, just like me: "Girl - your prose is a mess! What the hell are you even saying?" First, let me just say, yes, sadly, I am sober.
I'm just really angsty. Really moody. I have a backlog of toxic yuri and robot girl ramblings, erotic vignettes, unproduced zines, cobwebbed talents and hobbies as untouched as a white, straight, cisgender wife. There's so much I want to do! But somewhere along the way I've been spoiled, maybe cheated by dopamine. I'm undiagnosed or unmedicated enough that the mere fantasy of payoff has kept me going. Tortured artist, maybe? Maybe.
Ugh, and look at that. Now it's no longer sad lesbian ennui. I've ruined it! It's frustration and absurdity what burns at the base of my abdomen now, threatening to reach down like teasing fingers, to excite but never satisfy. I'd rather they coil my throat and choke me... just a little, as a treat.
Look up the etymology of "to curry favor." Anything is good art if you're silly enough for the time you live in.
And please. Don't be so scared or so ashamed to be honest with your angsty and vulnerable desires. It is good to share, even if only for yourself. Perhaps especially. I promise, it won't take away from you. It will only ever add more of you to the world.
