This is part of an ongoing series where I process things from therapy. Not necessarily linear, not necessarily sequential, but some kind of order seemed necessary. Although I’ve never seen SATC, these are to be read in the tone of Carrie Bradshaw (but maybe? slightly? less insufferable?)
I recently went though my email account in search of something an ex had said to me. Even though I knew what he had said, I wanted confirmation of the exact wording. I needed the surrounding parts to fully recreate the statement and before I knew it I was deep inside. This isn’t the first time I have returned to J’s emails. There are a few that I frequent, all of them critical, and a couple are very mean. I use the worst parts as a form of self flagellation. The idea that no one is as hard on you as you are on yourself doesn’t always stand when you date people who are at good at hurting you. When I’m feeling unable to hurt myself in the ways I need, there’s a few places I go for help, a few memories I manifest.
During this haunt I not only found what I was looking for,
“It’s a truism that ones feelings for their partner can and will and do change over time, so why point it out? That seems a lot like saying, ‘have a good day at work, it’s statistically likely that you’ll die in a car crash on the way there or back.’ Why state the obvious? I’m not trying to excoriate you for doing it, but its something worth thinking about why you do. Why do you think you draw attention to the mortality of your relationship(s)?”
I found a list of theory I had planned to read that I still haven’t (Eve Sedgwick, Lee Edelman). An email referencing Deleuze and Zizek as they related to my masochism (lol) that basically argued that all tops are service tops but I think that’s intellectual property and I will not under any circumstances elaborate further.
I found a very beautiful defense of my affinity for ambiguity. In an essay by Lauren Berlant (featured in one of the books on my list to read in 2013) they say,
“On behalf of making you desire to think about incoherence as a condition of feeling…a virtually rhythmic difference between the encounter with affect and the process of achieving clarity in it”
Which I understood as “feeling floaty” or, feeling a feeling before you know what you’re feeling. I fell in love with Berlant through this, through their advocating for the space between a feeling and a name. They are of the best things I received from this relationship. I wonder if they believe in ghosts.
I found several dreams-daydreams, sex dreams, fantasies about all the lives I could have; with who I was dating, with my friends, with myself. The power of fantasy was something that increased in importance for me in recent years. When I moved to NYC and really sought to be an architect for a new life, the only way I knew how to do that was to let myself dream and dream vividly. Daydreaming is a way to create language and a landscape for what life could look like when we don’t let the imagination fail. (Utopias as the success of imagination, dystopias as the failure of imagination-someone smarter please write this for me) Some of these dreams have overlapped and I realized I’ve made the players in them somewhat interchangeable. I have reoccurring daydreams-someone is sitting on a couch and I climb on top of them, bushing research materials (I seem to like to date writers. Girls just want to be described, after all) away from their lap and replace them with my body. Or it’s a fantasy about being choked or being good or being used. Fantasies where I say over and over, “I’m yours” until I feel like I belong (in this one, they never say “you’re mine.” I can hear my therapist asking me why I think that is.) Dreams of sharing writing and reading. Dreams of dancing and travel. All of these are dreams I still have. I’m hoping its less that I lack imagination and more that these are the things that matter to me. I keep trying with embarrassing sincerity and earnestness to find those who fit inside them.
I found that some of the things I’m confronting in therapy are not new. The idea that nearly 7 years later I am still struggling with agency, with clearly describing and seeking what I want from myself, my life, and the people in it, is mortifying. I realized that in my current relationship, on more than one occasion, I have drawn attention to its mortality. This beautiful and nascent thing in my life, a source of so much grace and healing, was already being called into question in the same way all the ones before it had been.
I found another Berlant quote-
“Love, not just as a feeling one has, but also as a marker for a whole constellation of things that one wants to experience extremely. Love approximates a space to to which people can return, becoming as different as they can be from themselves without being traumatically shattered; it is a scene of optimism for change, for a transformational environment.”
I found I have always sought relationships that afford all parties the chance to get lost in possibility. My affection for ambiguity has to do with feeling like something dies inside of certainty, something dies once you commit to it. I realize that this is an uninhabitable position, at least in the long term. This unlivable condition is probably why we channel this kind of ambiguity into sex, into orgasm. It’s the safest place to become undone because the time spent inside it is severely limited. I wondered in that relationship, really we wondered together, what would happen if we could make that space into a life. I felt that if I could name it, the end, if I could live with it, it could create the circumstance for ambiguity to take place. Like a conjuring. If I can reach into the future and call out to the ghost of us, if I can bring it forth and put it in the room we share, we can invite it in and in doing so, then the future will change. If you can live alongside your own ghost then do you ever really die?
Eventually, J got me to think about why I do this. It should have been obvious to him, as someone who was so versed in psychoanalytic thought, that I was/am terrified of people leaving and I trust that they always will. Laying the leaving out in clear terms, naming it as an eventuality creates kind of a dress rehearsal. The only way I know how to create safety, or to navigate uncertainty is through planning, a risk aware and consensual approach. There’s a reason play and BDSM are healing, it’s a safe space to act out feelings and emotions a way to get close to things that scare us, to demystify pain and confront what animates (or haunts) our dreams. It makes space for theory versus praxis, fantasy versus reality. It’s there we can recalibrate our nervous systems and reset the fight or flight response that makes some of us constantly afraid.
I found it was never truly an affinity for ambiguity, that I’ve always named the thing. In my failure to imagine a future that was safe, I let my fear take the form of a ghost and made graveyards out of my relationships.
