Personal Journal
December 29, 2004
Sixty years old. It’s a year after I started this book; I’d planned by now to have finished writing it — and I have not.
I’m running into resistance to the writing, even though I still want to do it, and feel uniquely satisfied when I do. I’m discovering that it’s an ongoing investigation: I keep writing more in my journal that I could put into the book. I’m also not finished fleshing out the outline I originally set for the book.
But a few things have become clear. I avoid working on it because I feel aversion for sex itself. And that’s because I don’t know how to
- perceive, admit to myself, know … what I want, in order to feel turned on, or interested in sex; and
- ask for it.
So sex is not very satisfying, as an all-round experience. Emotional and spiritual as well as physical.
In fact I don’t know how to ask for what I need, from Jesse, in general. Need? Want? I don’t know how to judge the line between them, don’t know how to value what I want. Don’t feel comfortable asking for what I want. Am always afraid — or often, convinced — I’m being selfish. I am: I am a very self-centered person. My attention revolves around my fears and my negative judgment of myself and my incapacity to be effective in the world. Negative ego.
O, some power help me. All thou guardians and guides, help me please.
The glamour of being a victim: It’s not my fault that I’m… [fill in the blank].
Working on this book has raised my consciousness about how this dynamic pervades my life, my relationship with Jesse. Of course he does his half, having been programmed by the culture as effectively as I have to do mine. Such a sad dance. Sometimes we see it, almost always after the fact. Lately, we have often been able to laugh at it. But at this moment, I feel exhausted by it.
Still I choose engagement. I choose sexuality, and I choose to be in relationship. No matter how often we both end up hiding out in our separate lives, I choose to reach out.
I choose to ask for what I want. I choose to find a way to feel desire without guilt at feeling desire. I choose to satisfy desires without feeling guilt at satisfying them. I choose to do this as a matter of course, without agonizing and obsessing over it. I choose to act appropriately. I choose appropriate sexuality, I choose holy sexuality. I choose to make my sexuality an offering to the life force, to sunyata, dedicated to the enlightenment of all beings. I choose to find a way to engage in sex that makes me happy, that feels meritorious.
All that may not happen. Yet I choose it. My chest feels heavy, my breath short. There is a band around my head, pressing. It doesn’t hurt, but I feel constricted, narrowed, limited, cut off from a wider consciousness. What chemical is coursing through my brain, or not (as the case may be), altering my neurological functioning to result in this depression? What can I do about it?
I choose life. I choose life. I choose life. I choose functionality, I choose sexuality, I choose relationship. No matter how damaged I am, how much of a list I swim with, I choose the encounter.