Say fuck off more often

Helen miran was recently quoted as saying: 

"at 71 if I had one piece of advice for my younger self, it would be to tell people to fuck off more often" 

I concur, and will try to implement that advice swiftly and with a heavy hand. I will use it as a measuring stick for knowing what is right and what is plainly wrong. This is a reminder to myself, do not put up with the wrongs of human actions. Seek out only the good.  In an attempt to set the record straight I will conduct this retrospective analysis of wrongs. Let me say in the loudest of voices from the tops of mountains for all to hear, fuck off.  I deserve better. 

To you, the guy who I was merely trying on for size but who none the less stopped making out with me, stopped mid kiss to state the obvious that I was in fact less than nothing to him. His lips still nearly touching mine he reminded me that this was merely a "friends with benefits" scenario. As if romance was no longer a required pass for entry. Fuck off. 

To the same man later in the evening who felt that sexual liasons should be conducted with little or no concern for my enjoyment, resisting any attempts I made to rectify the situation by stating that infact that wasn't going to work for him. As if being a bistander of his pleasure was sufficient reward for my company. Fuck off! 

To further inspire injury over insult he chose to post photos soliciting the company of strangers naked in his pool instead of inviting my company only days later. Fuck off. No really, I am serious, fuck off. 

To the man who periodically tries to court me by suggesting tempting and exciting joint bussiness ventures, making plans, concocting ideas. He uses the term "we" in sentences about our future and engages my expertise in his projects, and invites me for breakfast and lunch. But ultimately in the end always chooses to run off with girls with short skirts, tan legs who smoke and drink heavily but offer sex on a platter, served and delivered. To you, fuck off. 

To the man who I fell in love with and who dumped me seven times to run off with other women engaging instead in the seemingly innocuous game of just friends. A scenario that is akin to having a platonic boyfriend who withholds sex from me, and tortures me with his slightly out of reach loveliness, making me feel like his unattractive little sister who he is gerously letting tag along. Well, let me say loud and clear with anyone willing to bear witness. Fuck off!

To the man who ages ago ended my marriage by taunting me with all that was him and teasing me with cake, grandiose bussiness plans and unhavable romance but who ultimately left me for a russian model when I needed him most. Fuck off.

I say this mantra because I deserve someone who wants me and loves me and cares for me. I deserve someone who sees me and knows what he has found when he has found it. He knows that i am the perfect ven diagram of beauty, brains and heart. Someone who doesn't need to think twice about this equation. To the rest who want to play with my emotions and leave me to dine alone, fuck off. Really, fuck off!

Its going, flowing, moving

Nyala. My mind seems oddly stuck on this word. Like a strangers voice repeating in my head over and over again. Nyala. It is the word in Indonesian that people use to describe when the water starts running thru the hose after being blocked, or the motor starts to turn over after being stuck on idle. Nyala, Nyala, nyala.

My life is flowing, like a river, flowing. 

I think I may have finally let him go. Let him drop like a rock. My obsessive daily thoughts are starting to slowly fade like the sun setting over the horizon, dusk is gradually enveloping me. Yesturday I floated thru my day surrounded by firmiliar faces. Nyala, nyala. Its unstuck, its moving, its going. Nyala, nyala. I felt singular but surrounded. Wrapped up. Men were suddenly everywhere, coming out of the woodwork. Like men in camoflage stepping out from behind trees. Texting me, inviting me out, hugging me and showing up at my house. Nyala, nyala. 

Something has shifted, like the wind. Nyala, nyala, nyala. 

Reframing my inner slut and other psychological transformations

I did it. I had random sex and feel nothing about it. I will not marry this man, nor will I at any point consider him my boyfriend. I simply fulfilled a basic human need for comfort, and gratification. I did it.

I can do this. I can be a proper slut. Its a lofty goal I know. But I think it is achievable. I am going to abandon urges to attatch to one person like a sea urchin clinging to a rock. I will open myself up to all people and all things and at least ponder them for a moment. I will float like a leaf, landing on a man's lap just long enough and then float away again. I will let them in. I will seperate and devide emotion and physical pleasure. Creating lines and spaces and boundaries so all of these things can exist seperately. I will reframe my sluttiness as that of a cat in heat. No more. Seeking out satisfaction. I will emulate the fierce nancy, the drug lord of weeds fame who stares down strangers in elevators grabbing hands and legs and stealing quick bits of pleasure and then letting the doors close. Drinking men up like milkshakes and leaving the glass dirty for someone else to wash. 

"Don't call it sluttiness" my friend pleaded over dinner as if I were saying a bad word. "call it open to new things" 

"Thats why you left your marriage" chimed in her boyfriend. No in fact this is not accurate, I left my marriage so that I could take the friendships I had and make them more intimate. The irony is thick as mud that infact I still can't do this, I thought as I looked across the table at my friend who I would happily borrow just to exchange a bit of our souls for a small moment. But I can't do this with any of the many men in my life, so i will have to settle for strangers.

I will reframe it from my giving away of something valuable to consider it the taking of something free. I will have it. I will take it and I will walk away without care. 

I will do this because it is the only antidote to longing, heartache and crushing lonliness. It is the cure for my disease. It will imunise me, inoculate my brain from over active oxytocin receptors being fludded by the interaction of one person. I need many. I need many people I need to keep moving on to the next. I need to keep sorting not sticking to just one. 

Everything can change in a day

It just takes one day to change your life I read yesturday on someones random facebook meme. Yes, this is possibly true. Just possibly. 

But alas today was not the day my life changed, or yesturday. 

 Last night I was ditched at the last minute yet again by the random platonic friend who keeps trying me on for size. He slips me on like that shirt you have in your dresser that you feel like you should like in theory but in practice everytime you put it on it somehow doesn't make you want to wear it so you take it off and toss it back in the pile of undesirable cloths. This trying on and discarding somehow always leaves eating alone with only my extra side of brocoli for company. I decided to take a random tinder date to fill the time between meeing up with actual friends. The man who greated me was wearing a calllared expedia shirt and drinking a beer at a restaurant that was clearly chosen by someone who finds charm in all things generic. He upon basic inquiry turned out to in fact work for expedia and apparently felt the need to provide free advertising for them even while on vacation. Was there anythng else I needed to know about this man? I didn't think so. I abandoned him after only minutes of conversation by concocting a nearly incomprehensable excuse as to why I had to exit even befor I had achance at ordering a drink. 

Today I met a female friend for lunch who is in a new and seemingly happy relationship. I managed to say out loud as I briefly lost my breath that I think of that man with the curly hair every day and that the hardest part is realising that most people you meet you feel nothing for. That most people you can't even manage to get thru coffee. That the thing that he ran from every month for nearly a year was rare like Australian beef cooked on low heat. It can't be found everytime you bump into someone new.

Stop thinking about it. Stop thinking about was and start to focus as if your life depended on it on what could be. 

Focus on the one who is walking around right now who you will meet. He will suddenly just walk up to you on a street and say something smart and funny and you will want him and he you. He will have been an academic or a journalist or an author but now he is independent and entrepreneurial and free from the constraints of money and comitment. He likes to get muddy and sweaty in the jungle while on long hikes. He may have his financial house in order but he will care little of material posessions and prefer good healthy food and time and freedom over fancy cars and things like couches. 

He will like to tickle your intelect with deep thoughts and can be silly and witty and make you laugh hard every morning and every night. He likes music and delivers new offerings to your ears as he finds them. He has an older child or he doesn't but loves the possibility of having one. 

He sometimes grabs you and kisses you on the back of the neck for no reason. If he danced he knows how to lead and if he doesn't well, he still knows how. 

He gently arm wrestles your wisdom and takes in your messy world without judgement. He laughs when you loose your keys or your way or forget to buy shampoo. When he meets you you both say wow, I know you. There is something there.

He is surely walking around, he is real he exists at any moment you may pass him on the street. Focus on this. Everything can change in a day. 

On solitude

I sat around a dinner table with 4 girls, it was our weekly ladies night in which we talked mostly about our love life and held each others emotional hands over red wine and chocolate cake. 

Three of them took turns talking about thier collective luck in each finding new love in some form or another. They swooned and aplauded each other. I chimed in to congratulate them but tried hard to keep my own grief and solitude out of the conversation until a new girl who didn't know the tragic details of my love life...asked. It then came flooding out like a sad muddy river. My river was more tragic than the ganges river in India, with more dead bodies floating in it then should be allowed for bathing and washing of white saris. 

This girl listened and then said along with the rest nearly in unison, "it is good for you to learn to be alone. It will make you strong. Being alone is good. You don't need someone." In that moment I wanted to hurl my cake across the table at her until it soiled her pretty white cardigan with chocolate splatters. She was not alone and based on her horrid choices in past boyfriends nor would she choose to be. So why was she dolling out this horrid advice like the chalky pastel mints next to the cash register at all American diners. They are not good, nor should they be taken even if they are free. None of these girls keeping me momentary company were alone, all of them would leave our dinner and crawl into bed with someone who would hold them close. All off them would disapear silently off into the night and keep someone company untill another week went by for us to meet again. So then, why were they all extolly the virtues of aloneness?

The death rate for lonely people is statistically higher. Lonliness is a silent killer which goes untalked about. A secret kept hiding under the stairs with dust mites and sad lonely spiders. People who are alone are more likely to die of cancer and heart disease and more likely to suffer from depression. 

Solitary confinement is a punishment in prison and during war because it is physically painful. More painful than a knife to the skin. Taking humans away from each other actually hurts, physically hurts. Yet, we live in a society that rewards solitude. 

In bali, where I call home no one would ever consider solitude a goal worth striving for. The balinese do nearly everything in groups. I once walked into a room to discover all four of my staff cleaning one window. This is not because this window demanded this kind of effort but because they wanted to be together. Close together, right next to each other in fact. I frequently find them all curled up on my porch sleeping happily together under one blanket. For them, togetherness is easy. The western world fights it and keeps it at bay, believing that solitariness is the kind of noble pursuit of the likes of Hemingway, lost at sea writing great works. I reject all of this, I believe we should have people. But which people I wonder as I sit alone at home with my phone and my computer. Which people? 

Not good enough

"That is a very sexy dress" he once told me before taking it off. It was a blue dress with a white stripe. It was the dress that embodied sex appeal. My presence in it was merely circumstantial to him. This was the pinacle, the peak of his complements. The point at which I should linger endlessly imagining that more might come around the corner. That any minute if I waited he would decide to want me, to pull me in, to grab me hard. More didn't come. For a whole year I was left wanting and waiting.

"Why would you want that?" Someone who left you wanting, someone who would rather seek out sex with strangers than dare admit that they may actually want you. Why would I? Why would I not seek out the version of love that even strangers on tinder will show up to give me. Complimenting my yet unknown beauty with flower emoticons. Want me hard, love me big. Tell me all about it. This is how I want to be loved. 

This year was a year of pain and wanting, only neatly punctuated with moments of sheer bliss. Just enough to keep me hooked on the drug, waiting lonely and in pain for the next fix. Willing to rob banks for the oxcytocin he sold me in small dribbles, I hung around like a junkie on the street corner. Like sucking water drips from a broken faucet on a hot day I waited around for him to doll out small droplets of love. This pain was something I inflicted upon myself. I stood there and took it like a limp punching bag. Proof of purchase of my intelectual dominion over my reptilion brain. If I could just sit on my porch and serve him tea while he gave his body to others, I had won. I had won against biology. But I was really just treading water, bearing the pain with the hope that I could have the next fix, like a washed up crack whore. 

This is now a new chapter. A new book. A book bound in leather with gold embosed lettering. This next book of life will turn the corner on this waiting and wanting. I will offer up the world to myself. 

This book will have stories of love, of  wealth, abandon and abundance. Stories of rain showers and sunny meadows. 

All things yummy and good. Money and love will flow out of my pockets and spill onto the floor. I will only seek out and let in the best of what is good. This will be a salad year, a year of cheese and chocololate and wine. A year of dancing and friends. A year of beauty and play and creation. This is a new book.

Its all the same

Angry young girl music is what I listened to at 20. I listened to it because at 20 it is all about relationships and I was in the midst of feeling that even at 20 the game was not worth playing. I let Ani defranco croon "fuck you, and your untouchable face" loud in my ear as I drove thru the desert night in my tiny beat up 84 honda civic. The warm desert wind wipping my hair around like a blow dryer. It was then that I gave up, it was then that I picked a random guy out at a party and said "he'll do". It was then that I gave up weeding thru lonlines and strangers like sad lost gardener with no seeds or tools. It was then that I gave up.

I picked this random man with intention. I picked him because he seemed good enough. He was a bit fat and seemed way too enthusiastic about his lack of a job, but with a likable dry wit and an obvious humble sweetness. We stood in front of a world map smoking a joint for the duration of the party discussing all the adventures the world had to offer.  I decided that he wouldn't hurt me. I decided he was a safe bet whose self esteem was just low enough that I seemed like a phenomenal catch. A big Alaskan salmon in a small muddy pond. I could safely ensure that he would worship without wandering eyes at the alter of me from then on.

After the first night with him I met my girlfriend for coffee and proclaimed that I didn't really like him at all. His penis was small and it was all akward. But he listended to me endlessly while I talked  so we persisted based on this small egotistical boost and his many thoughtful gestures. 

At six months into our relationship the burly bearded pastry chef who ran the oven at the bakery where I worked began to take an interest in me. Woo me with instructions on how make a proper chocolate ganache. Somehow without real effort he managed to get me to indulge in a teenage makeout session in the parking lot against the faded grey paint of my civic. I didn't really like him beyond our obvious chemistry but decided to sneak off for a weekend in a nearby mining town and stay the night in a place that called itself the copper queen. Contemplating if I could have my cake and eat it too, It was at this point that I should have realized my relationship was over. I should have jumped ship and run for the hills. Continued to bravely sort thru humans like piles of second hand denim looking for the right match of pocket style, color and size. Instead I ended up half naked and in tears leaving my date sexually unfullfilled and perplexed.  

I felt deep pain, I knew I needed to leave this man who had in six months become my boyfriend, and I had failed at my one feeble attempt, running away with the baker. 

I knew that this fat, spineless man was not Indiana jones and that stoned in front of a map was the closest he would ever get to travel unless dragged unwittingly by someone like me. I knew that I didn't want him, I knew that he would never grow into anything more than what stood before me. But the pain, how to explain the pain. The thought of loosing him after six months hurt so bad that I could no longer bear it. I needed it to stop and my lack of experience in such matters compelled me to mistake this feeling of ache for the type of love that should be stuck around for. 

To opese this pain like a slave to its master, I ran home and replaced one sin with another. I told him of my trip, safely omitting the details which even 17 years later would be stoked like a fire when tempers flared. I then told him a lie that I could never take back and only time would grow it into a version of the truth with a bit of care and watering. I lied and said I thought we should be together. I knew it was a lie and over the years would wisper the truth to those who would listen, like a hostage trying to solicit help escaping from her captor. I would say in quiet rooms "he is not the one I should have ended up with". My poor naive 20 year old self ended up making a life with someone as a trade for the gut achinging pain of loss. This is not a worthy trade. But a life I made. This man for 17 years was sweet to me. He brought me chocolate without asking at the right time of the month, he held my hair back and comforted me when I was sick, he organised all the details of our life that I would sooner let slip thru the cracks. He would not chastise me for only noticing I needed milk or shampoo when the containerd were empty, and instead quietly slip full containers into place. He was many things that I now know many men are not. The error I made was in not spending those years appreciating these things but instead lamenting my youthful choice of weakness. 

When I finally decided to walk away, I did so imagining that I could rectify this mistake. That I could forgive my 20 year old self for her lack of courage. This time the older and wiser me would make the right decision. But what did I do? I immediately fell in love with the first person I slept with. If he hadn't walked away I never would have. I would have tolerated his drunkenness and his most certain later scoldings for empty toothpaste toobs. 

I now take a moment to forgive my 20 year old self for her weakness, because even at 39 I know I lack the strength to resist the power of a proper human bond. I forgive you. I forgive you, but now do it right don't let pain guide you. Let hope and beauty and all things good be your guide. Let yourself stand alone and proud and strong so that you may not just survive but be happy beyond measure.