Free writing journal update, this thread is the first one I made here and keep returning to it to deposit thoughts and address the first questions I had in my head when I arrived here.
This post is quite dark in places.
Week 4 is midway and the free writing has gone into overdrive, I do some at the beginning and end of every day approx 40 mins a day just writing. No plan or desired outcome, the only rule is to not stop writing or pause or think until the timer has ended. The objective is to codify the emotional reasons why I drink.
This week shame, self doubt and sex are in my mind, they have always been in my mind but a recurring set of words are appearing on the pages every day and I am pulling them to the surface.
We had IVF to have our baby, we lied to the drs to say we had been trying and trying and we hadnt, thats not cool, I know. truth is, is I cant do physical intimacy, intimacy and sex has always been a performance, a fake thing that I sit outside of myself and watch, watch myself phoning it in. Lots of relationships have ended because of this. When my sexual identity began in puberty it was broken and forced in an unhealthy direction and ended up being wired wrong. I want to get it but sex is so hard wired in with shame and humiliation that I dont know how to do it.
The performance of sex and being with people is so unusual to me, I find both men and women attractive but I dont want to see anyone’s junk. At fifteen I would vomit on myself when servicing men in an underground club called the Dorchester in Birmingham. Sex tastes like vomit, vodka vomit. My mums friend Iain took me there, i was convinced that that was my thing, thats what young boys did. I can talk about it and rationalise it but my body doesn’t listen. Its like being burned and now physically I cant go near fire. How do you do it? How do you re-programme your brain to do it, to be in your body more, or in your body at all. In 2015 I met an artist called Ron Athey a few years ago and was transfixed with his art work, his work is based on religious iconography, sex, BDSM and his blood, he was diagnosed wit Aids in the mid 80s in San Fransisco and he luckily lived. He always uses blood in his shows. It was like seeing the key images of my childhood being explored in art, his work is not about abuse in any way and having met and spent time with him he is a lovely gentle man. and through his art he is able to explore the viscera of his life. it got me thinking that by exploring ritual and gesture I could unpack, and safely confront the mess, huge fucking mess in my head and in my bones. All of this happened and it was 20 years before I could articulate it, I had dissociated enough to have blanked chunks of my post puberty life out.
Pre puberty my life was colourful and vivid because my father was there, he knew how to be around children to be vivid and available. all of the hugs I give people are based on my fathers hugs. Once puberty hit it triggered something in my parents that stopped them from knowing how to engage with them. My mother was smashed up by her parents and rendered drunk broken and unable to hug or be caring, when she first met my baby son the first thing she said was ‘when you were this age, i didn’t know how to love you…’ Both of my parents had been so sexually repressed by their staunch catholic upbringing that talking to a teenager was like talking to an extra terrestrial. Iain made me feel safe when this was going on, he saw me being emotionally estranged and he became my parents, he made me feel special. He had requirements though, I am 40 and only now I can talk about it those requirements.
‘Here’s to those who have suffered no suffering’ Patti Smith