Day 369: Sex & the fear of failure

19122013

The moon is used as a symbol of femininity in witchcraft - "The Moon" by Alphonse Mucha

I haven't been writing for a few days because I have been preoccupied by practical application. I am going through something very intense in my relationship towards another person and it's required most of my spare time and attention. I am / we are now starting to find some kind of a balance after the first few days of constant new underlying points popping up and being discussed, so I am now also getting back to writing. I am not sure what to write about, but I will probably try to make an overview of what I've been going through.

Okay, as I was making a list of all the points that have surfaced within the past few days, one point stood out as I noticed I was reluctant to look at it. I've been thinking a lot about how I perceive sex through a negative filter: I compare myself to people who think of sex as something fun and exciting (an ideal here maybe) whereas I am nervous, tense and outright scared. Whenever sex comes to play, it feels as if I shrink. All of my insecurities are magnified and I feel incredibly small and vulnerable. I know people (women) who have a completely different take on sex where they feel empowered through sex, strong and magnificent. Although, hang on. Have I ever heard them put it into words like that? I see that my vision of “who I should be” within sex might actually be yet another self-created illusion. Let's look into that.

A few years ago I got really into witchcraft, which is a very female-driven phenomenon. I read a lot of literature (fact and fictional) on the subject and got the idea that a woman can in fact enjoy sex on her own terms by embracing her femininity. I basically created this image of the sexually empowered witch woman – a magical creature – something “more” than who I was – someone with the extra “magic” or understanding about what sex is and how it works.

I'm guessing I have filtered my friends – the people who approach sex with a positive attitude – according to this ideal and imagined them to “already be there”, to have achieved that magical something which I haven't. I've made myself feel like a failure as I have believed I'd need to be something “more” when in fact what I'm looking for is something less.

What sex basically is is touch. What separates it from other kinds of touch is usually the involvement of genitalia and/or a sense of intimacy, being “unusually” close. Touching other people is fun to start with: it's a form of communication and play, a tool for creation. Through touch movement is created; in it's ultimate form, new life can be created. The thing is, sex isn't usually seen to be that simple. First off, it is though of as a “special” kind of a touch. This is one layer of shit placed over the simplicity of sex. Also, sex is highly visualized, separating the act from the other senses (touch, taste, hearing, smell) – another layer of shit. Sex is also valued as a trophy, it is demonized, it is used as currency, it's used to control – shit, shit, shit – the conceptual (imagined) reality of sex has become an entity of its own. Even under all these layers of shit, all the beliefs that we have painted over our reality, underneath all that sex is still primarily a touch. In any sex scenario I can conjure in my mind underneath the roles all I see is trembling flesh. It's all just vibrations and frequencies, the flesh in differing tempo and beat.

So: what is the conceptual reality I have painted over the simple physical reality of sex? What are the layers of shit I need to peel off to get to the null point?

I am basically afraid of failure. I think of sex as something I need to succeed in. I use it as a measuring point for my worth. I'm getting kind of sick and tired about this “I'm not good enough” -sentence that keeps on surfacing behind EVERY SINGLE POINT I ever walk through because I'm still not sure where the fuck it comes from. Perhaps I'm just a culmination of the kind of femininity that has submitted under (male) abuse and dominance for aeons. What has created me is all the men and women in my lineage – and that's such a shitload of people that I can't even begin to imagine what they were like. But I'm guessing the issues have always remained the same, so it's enough that I look at the little I know of my history. My history is the human kind's history.

The way my fear of failure manifests within sex is through a basic concept: the belief that sex has to be “good” (a definition containing an ideal) for my partner to be satisfied and not leave me (which implies that the reason I look for relationships is to not be alone, hence the fear of being abandoned). Therefore I'm never really having sex for myself, as an act of self-expression, but for others. There may be other aspects to this as well but this is what's surfacing right now. I'll continue tomorrow with SF on this point specifically.

Day 258: Passion is not magic

17062013

Recently I have been thinking about passion. I have been accepted to university to study a subject I am not passionate about in the same way I have been passionate about other things so far, and this lack of “fire in my soul” makes me question the whole concept of motivation and what has been driving me forward so far.

In the past few years as I have been mainly working and having arts as a hobby, trying to get into art schools but never succeeding. I have met a lot of people in my working environments that have either told me or shown me they have a passion for nothing, and many of them have told me (with a tone I have interpreted to be sadness, bitterness and/or powerlessness) that I am lucky to be passionate about something. I have usually been unable to reply to such words, because all I have seen are people who are unwilling to find their passion. Recently I have come to realize that these people alone cannot be blamed for their lack of motivation for anything but survival and escapism, because the society itself determinedly passivates people from the moment of birth onwards and offers no assistance to overcome this.

Yet I have to question the whole concept of passion. When I am doing something that I have “a passion” for, I usually work with intense focus, I learn fast and I forget all else – I exist for that moment of action, whatever it may be, and I forget to eat, drink, rest – and I usually do not even have a need for any of this. I have experienced this with drawing, painting, making music, dance, stagework with other people, contact improvisation (including sex), baking, hiking, walking around, reading, studying, exploring my surroundings, having a conversation – a lot of things. I could basically have a passion for anything, even breathing, or eating, or drinking. I mean, if I can have a passion for moving my body aimlessly simply because I enjoy the movement, why not for anything at all?

So maybe “passion” is something to be found when you're at the core of an action, when you have a “reason” for it – which is to live, to realize your existence in this moment, in this reality. When I apply this to my motivation to study, I can see that I study because I realize my possibilities in this web of relationships we call “society” or “the world” or “the system”. I enjoy studying things that I see to have relevance. I enjoy applying the information that I absorb. I do not know how I will apply the information I am going to absorb in the future as my studies progress, because how I will apply it is dependent on what the information is – lol – so I cannot plan it, I'm going to have to create my future as I go. And that's alright.

So, yeah. In studying I am living according to my passion for learning, and I have some idea of how to specify my studies based on the fields that interest me. But this pathway didn't offer itself to me. I had to dig it up and choose it among a mass of options, all appearing just as uncertain to me. Somehow I think that the people who lack passion for things believe that this magical feeling of knowing what to do and why will just be gifted “from the above”, like enlightenment of some sorts. But this is not the case. If you have never seen a book, how would you know that you have a passion for reading? If you have never sat on a bike, how would you know you have a passion for riding a bike? How would you ever figure any of this out if you didn't explore the world, everything that there is in it, given that you have the opportunity for it?

As a child grows it integrates fast into whatever the world is shown to be, and if not given the mental tools to question this, if what one has experienced during one's childhood and adolescence is not fulfilling one might end up believing that the world is unfulfilling – when in fact it is one's experience of one's life so far that is unfulfilling and not the world itself. So people get stuck with the environments they have been born and raised in, with the activities they are familiar with, because they have not been taught to seek passion, to work for it. I was lucky enough to be gifted with a lot of opportunities to explore different activities as a child, and for this I am grateful to my family – but a lot of things I have discovered on my own as an adult, simply by grasping a point of slight interest and expanding on it through independent exploration. And these points of interest have grown into passion the more and more I have learned about them and invested myself into them.

So what I'm saying is that the belief that one ought to have a passionate feeling about something in order to act at all is a fallacy. If I'd keep on expecting a “holy spirit” to take over and direct me for myself, I would get nowhere, I would be standing still and waiting around for the rest of my life. Passion is not a heavenly wind that will magically make your life better – it is you moving yourself towards/within something you are drawn to. Passion is self-motivated action.