Poem 20

I once knew a girl

she was older than me

counting back, I suppose she was nine

She was a bit of a crush

if not really my first

I was easily charmed at the time

She liked somebody else

but then he turned her down

so to make her feel better, I said

"Well, I like you at least!"

She turned sharply on me

and my face may have turned a bit red

The contempt in her eyes

has stayed with me for years

I see now that my timing was off

but for years I took care

not to tell anyone

never told anyone
that I liked them that way

Seeing such a look once was enough.

Hirundo tries to understand sex

Let me interrupt this slowed down stream of poetry for a bit to talk about my relationship with sex. It might contain a little too much information for some people's taste… possibly including my own. It won't be very explicit, but I will move into some private parts of, well my mind. Not the other private parts. But anyway, more poetry will be coming up shortly.

My relationship with sex is that I like it a lot. I like it physically, but I also have an aesthetic interest in it – I like it as a thing to watch, to share, and as a craft to practice, the thought of giving shape to someone's pleasure. I also like it as a cultural and artistic theme, so-called high culture or so-called low. I like other people's interest in it. I'm curious about it. I would… also really like to do it again someday…

To be clear, I have done it before. Between the ages of nineteen and twenty-five, I was more or less sexually active. That is, I was in a few relationships, and had a few affairs, and sex took place. Still I did have a hard time finding romantic and/or sexual partners. It was almost impossible to express any interest, I just kept chewing at the words. I wished very badly that someone else would take the initiative, sit me down for a talk, or pick me up in a bar, but on the occasions when they did, I didn't handle it very well.

I was once asked by a woman at an event if I wanted to go home with her, for example, and was so surprised by the question that I answered no and ran away. Then I spent the next five years regretting it, which in itself indicates a not so healthy view of things.

I had always been embarrassed about my feelings around sex. Liking it. Being curious about it. Wanting it. I didn't even want to show myself that I wanted it. My sexual fantasies were almost always about a placeholder with a penis rather than about me, and that placeholder didn't get to make any active moves. He was just happily swept away by events. My erotic writings never really worked, because I couldn't get into the characters' motivations.

I wouldn't allow myself to imagine that a person I identified with could desire or be desired by someone sexually. It didn’t quite fit together with how I saw the rest of myself. I couldn't quite accept that this confused but sometimes charming mind also carried a body along with it. It was as if other people would find it distasteful if they knew, distasteful or even disgusting.

There's that word again, disgust… what I used in the post about being mentally undressed, about people finding out who I really am... It was as if wanting anything, at all, from the world was too much of an imposition on it. And disgust is obviously a keyword that I will be exploring in a future post.

After November, 2006, my period of other-person sexual activity has come to a complete stop. That's when my last act of physical intimacy took place. A lot of just-in-case condoms have met their expiry date since then.

For a long time, I more or less resigned to this. It seemed to be just one more of those things I didn't understand about my life. One of those areas where there was a large missing gap between the things I wanted and the things that occured. I wanted something to happen; it just didn't. It might even be for the best, as the way I handled whatever intimacy that did occur, as mentioned, was not all that healthy anyway.

How to find partners was just one those missing gaps. One among many. One of the most complicated. In 2006 I was just becoming aware of them, and I had started to work on some of them.  It was the beginning of that very protracted turning point in my life that I'm still not quite done with…

Slowly, as I realized I couldn’t become a therapist, went into therapy myself, began to take my writing more seriously, a mental list emerged, of things I wanted to improve in my life. Because finding partners would require a whole lot of more basic, social skills, I put it at the very bottom of the list. Something I would possibly dare to consider at some eventual point in the future. Hypothetically, of course.

When I did get to that point on my list – only a few years ago, I did it through introspective writing. I wrote about all of it on my Norwegian blog, as a sort of extreme exposure therapy. Then I posted a link on Twitter, and felt as if I had told the whole world that I was some sort of slobbering gnarly creature of want. The world didn't see it that way, of course.

The next spring I got braver, went deeper into my fears, frustrations, and longings, trying to figure out things like: What kind of sex did I want? What kind of people was I attracted to? Now fear of showing sexual agency had been tuned down, what were the other missing steps that stood between me and some occasional sex? My embarrassment now became a guide. When stuff became hard to write about, it meant I was onto something extra important.

It meant I was on the trace of a subject that was unclear to me. Things being unclear to me is actually a topic for a future post, the way something can be impossible to grasp, until I suddenly get some insight or other, and then everything becomes obvious and I realize how clear it should have been all along. Like, I keep wondering why no one ever picks me up at bars, and then I realize it's because I never actually go to bars. This is the center of those missing gaps between my intentions and my actions; behaviors I can't begin to change because I don't know that they are there.

Since then, I have been working on and off with things. Sometimes I would have to take breaks because I became overwhelmed by it all. Sometimes I would just lose interest. My libido can vary a lot in strength. I have worked mainly with thinking and writing, writing publically, gotten some good suggestions along the way. And I have figured out that it is not only about sex after all. While sex is there as a long time goal, the social and interpersonal and emotional skills I've had to learn have been good to me in a whole lot of ways. I have been rather immature for the most of my life in all these areas; I have the feeling these days that I am catching up, very fast.

There hasn't been any actual, physical sex with someone else. But as you can deduce from the wording of that statement, there have been a couple non-physical exchanges, some hot IM-ing on dating sites that were nice even if it didn't lead to anything more. This spring, I went out on a date, that also didn't lead to anything more. My erotic writing has improved, as I'm able to understand both agency and desire now. And I do have fairly satisfactory sex with myself. Besides being nice, it makes me need a partner less, and that will make things easier when I do eventually find one.

Thinking out loud on my Norwegian blog, and later at certain discussion forums, has been a large part of the development over the last couple of years… and my frustrations with sex and intimacy has been a large part of the introspective writing voice I have developed. It's something I am likely to write more about, and this post has been posted as an introduction to that, as well as an overview of where I stand today.

The people whose approval I want

Sometimes I am overwhelmed by the sense that to gain the approval of people I like, I need to submit my opinions and beliefs to theirs. When they describe a certain social or political problem, (like the issues of bias and inequality I was reading about before I began this post,) I just have to take their word for it. But the people I like don't all think the same. Some of them have opposing views. It would be impossible to submit to all of their ethics at once. And even if I worked out what I was supposed to believe, I don't have the power to control my own beliefs.

This is where I take things out of proportion, probably fueled by the fear that the people whose approval I want will find out who I really am, and then turn against me and hurt me.

The inner monologue runs something like this: How completely do I need to submit? How deep inside my mind do I have to let them, how far beyond my normal level of awareness, how far beyond the borders of my Self?

DISCLAIMER GOBLIN: You don't.

Yeah, how can I go about to meet the standards of those people, if it requires me to reach down to the basic cogwheels of my mind? How can I make a conscious effort to change the very components of my consciousness?

DISCLAIMER GOBLIN: Are you listening to me at all? You can't. Now I advice you strongly to stop talking for a while, because this is offensive to the people whose approval you want, making them out to demand such absurd things of you.

Dear reader: This is the Disclaimer Goblin. He's the part of my writing voice that inserts itself when I grow uncomfortable with my own words. The way to answer him is to examine that discomfort; that's usually how I learn from my writing.

But in this case, I'm a bit uncomfortable with his words, because isn't it offensive in itself to presume what other people would be offended by?

DISCLAIMER GOBLIN: Yeah, there's that. I guess we're in the same boat on this.

So rather than offensive, let's say I'm being unfair to the people whose approval I want.

A lot to ask
It is unfair to them partly because I need their approval just a little too much. With those insecurities I talked about before – the fear that I never belong, the fear that I have a disgusting side to my personality that I'm barely able to hide – I would need more than a bit of convincing before I believe in someone's approval.

That's probably one reason why I worry about intimacy in general. When people get a closer look at me, I begin to concern myself too much with their approval. I have been on the other side of that, I have a particular case in mind, with someone who concerned themselves too much with my approval. At its worst, in that person's eyes, I felt like nothing more than a substitute for those whose disapproval he had met with in the past.

But on the other hand, people are allowed to have needs. We are allowed to be insecure. Intimacy in particular makes room for both of these. The problem is when need come up against boundaries. When we go along with things because we are insecure, or when we disregard the other person's boundaries because their disapproval makes us too afraid to deal.

It looks like I am becoming better with boundaries, in great part because I've learned how criticism isn't always fatal judgment. Maybe I can relax a bit more now, around the people whose approval I want.

Standards to live up to
I was also being unfair above because I made a straw man out of other people's social? interpersonal? ethical? values – I'm not exactly clear on what kind of standards they are, only that I made a straw man out of them. No one has called on the thought police, no one demands that I should edit my every thought, at least none of the people whose approval I want, they're not like that any of them.

Unreachable standards are in a way comfortable to deal with, because they are so very easy to disregard. That could be one motivation for making them out to be impossible, unfairly imposed, a call for complete submission. I suppose some people do that: Look for a reason to disregard those standards because they just aren't that interested in meeting them. On the other hand, it could also be that someone doesn't quite understand the standards in question. Things that aren't properly processed can often appear unreasonably black-or-white.

I hope I belong to the second category, that I do, honestly, want to reach for a higher standard. Why would I care about the approval of those people in the first place if I didn't see the value in their social, interpersonal, and ethical standards? I've noticed a thing about myself lately, that sometimes I state my values in a way that just sounds a bit too right. Like I'm quoting some pamphlet. Or performing for an audience. It's the way I seen other people speak that way when they are new to a certain way of thinking, still glowing with the discovery, not yet able to work from the deeper reasoning behind. I hope proper understanding is a thing that comes with maturity.

It's really about myself
I am not really sure. Whether I deserve the approval of those people or not. They do seem to approve of me, mostly. Maybe they just haven't found out who I really am yet. Or maybe I should trust their judgment. I mean, I do. Trust their judgment. Just not when it comes to me, apparently. What I know is I want to deserve their approval. It's not just their approval I want, it is to be worthy of it. I think that's one criterion for the kind of people I want in my life: People it would be worth it to be worthy of.

Because it's not really about their standards, it's about mine. Their standards are not imposed on me, they are an inspiration to me.

I don't know how to edit my opinions or beliefs. Not to mention my perceptions and immediate judgments. I suspect, if I were to line them up... I wouldn't quite like what I found. There would be social, political, ethical trends that went against my own standards. A bias to what people I liked at first sight, or trusted at their word. If nothing else because such biases are common, they exist below awareness, and I have no particular reason to believe myself immune.

Am I doing enough about that? Am I doing too much? Trying too hard? The approval of the people I like would be a measure that I am moving in the right direction.

I know I have values, strong ones even. And that they have been mine all along. As I said, they are not imposed on me. They are also not new to me: Issues like bias and inequality are things I have been concerned with for years, although not very loudly. If anything is new, maybe it is that I am engaging more with the people whose approval I want, as I am engaging more with people all over, and that makes me vulnerable.

Or, as isolation has its own set of vulnerabilities: It makes me vulnerable in different ways than before.

It could be that just that kind of vulnerability is what I need to learn a more mature approach to values, to have values of my own, not just try to live up to other's. The kind of vulnerability that makes me open to criticism, correction. But also more receptive to the approval I actually get. Scary as it might sound, vulnerability means I put more trust in other people's judgment when they see some good in me as well.