2024-11-11

homepage.content

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+
+: intimacy
+
+Though I had hugged before and had believed that I had loved people
+platonically and affectionately, I think the first time I actually experienced
+intimacy was in a Subaru Forester in February 2023 when a friend and I cuddled
+and watched the movie Parasite. Then the next month for unrelated reasons I
+became psychotic and we didn't interact much until that April when we were very
+close until June when they headed out. Then in August we met again, then
+September they were gone, and then October I was gone.
+
+The second entity with which I was physically intimate was a girlfriend I never
+really understood, in August. And while I thought things were alright in
+hindsight it seems like they were never super into me, maybe except an
+infatuation, and then I was gone and later we broke up.
+
+I should note that intimacy is not necessarily sexual, or the first paragraph
+would have been omitted, the second paragraph lengthened, another paragraph
+written in the place of this one.
+
+The third person with which I was intimate was a girlfriend who never really
+understood me, in October. And she thought everything was alright and I never
+let her know what I was feeling, why I was feeling, because truthfully I didn't
+know myself. I knew the air in my lungs felt stale, and her room felt like a
+prison, and our kisses left my lips chapped and my heart empty, and I felt like
+a piece of shit for not letting on.
+
+And then I hightailed it to the middle of somewhere in the west and didn't see
+her again, yet. I felt broken, unfixable, and I didn't know why. I thought my
+hosts, kind enough to let me stay in their apartment, would come to hate me, to
+despise me if I didn't support myself - actually, no, the idea of not
+supporting myself wasn't even the faintest whisper of a thought in my head. It
+was instinct, intrinsic knowledge to me that resources would be kept separate
+and that I could provide but could not be provided for.
+
+At some point [...] recommended I read Polysecure and I stopped reading when I
+got to the attachment styles because, though I knew it wasn't bogus, I wanted
+to believe it was bogus. I was working nearly every day a week and had no time
+to consider a notion of self improvement, besides the usual stuff like brushing
+my teeth and showering regularly. But I did occasionally meditate and I was
+trying to become more mindful, and as I did I started to realize things about
+how I was feeling emotion, or more specifically how I wasn't. I was turning my
+emotions off most of the time, failing to understand or react to situations in
+which people were displaying intense emotions. But while this was developed
+slowly, slightly, my personal life crescendoed into my preparing to leave to go
+back to somewhere anywhere else and then exploded into smithereens with my
+doing acid and realizing I needed to make great strides or else.
+
+And in that long year of 2024 in which we are still, I was intimate with some
+of my roommates, especially [...]. And I was also intimate, sexually too, with
+this college student I met, and I really, really like it. It is smart, funny,
+beautiful, listens to good music, and so on, and I just haven't been able to
+text or call it. Disastrously, for me anyway. And I have a crush on someone
+else and interact less with them for it. And before, during, and after these
+experiences of intimacy I just haven't felt like I've been able to form a
+connection with anyone. Let me do something stupid and quote Bring Me the
+Horizon:
+
+| Can you hear the the silence?
+| Can you see the dark?
+| Can you fix the broken?
+| Can you feel my heart?
+| Can you feel my heart?
+| I'm scared to get close, and I hate being alone
+| I long for that feeling to not feel at all
+| The higher I get, the lower I'll sink
+| I can't drown my demons, they know how to swim
+
+This song is overplayed and a meme but if you take the lyrics as poetry (which
+you should) it's a song about dismissive/avoidant attachment - when (to
+probably greatly oversimplify the matter) someone habitually, consciously or
+unconsciously, pushes away their close ones for fear of some sort of rejection
+or failure on their part.
+
+It was at one point when in the car with [...] when I mentioned offhandedly
+that I probably have some sort of intimacy issues that fae said "no shit" and
+pointed out to me that I am a textbook example. A lot of my motives are retro-
+spective explanations rather than the truth, that I am afraid of commitment and
+closeness, because I don't believe anything will last and because I have
+accumulated enough pain already from people not being there when they should
+have been.
+
+See, who needs a shrink? I can say disgustingly personal things about myself
+all on my own.
+
+In some ways I'm working on this and in some ways I am afraid to. I have this
+tightness in my chest, dizziness, deep feeling of dread about the concept of
+being close to someone else. I showered with someone else only once and it felt
+hollow, I've never received a back rub, I don't usually sit close to people
+even when I've known them for a long time, I don't tend to ask for help, I am
+scared shitless by the thought of waking someone up for something, and so on.
+It's just gonna be a lot of practice I guess. I need to be mindful of my own
+emotions, learn to lean on others, learn to trust. But! O, the terror!
+
+I don't trust, I don't like to trust, I don't like the thought of learning to
+like trusting. I don't understand why anyone likes commitment, why anyone
+trusts commitment. I have never been emotionally close to someone who hasn't
+disappeared within three months. If I received a backrub I wouldn't be able to
+stop myself from crying. How do you work towards damn near 1 from damn near 0?
+
+I guess I'll have to move slowly and figure it out.
+
+
 /blah/2024-09-29.html
 
 I'm 21 years old. The first time I purchased alcohol, legally, I.D. and