Yin and Yang

I have not touched this blog in a week. I have had no interest in sharing my thoughts with anyone. I am not sure if I even want to share them today but today as I listen to a podcast about sex with Glennon, Abby, and “sister”, I am compelled to write. I’d imagine if I share with anyone my thinking, that I am writing today because I miss someone they would say well why not reach out to that person. I wish it were that simple. I wish it were as simple as reaching out to someone and sharing with them that I miss them. It isn’t. When I’ve reached out it has resulted in total annihilation for us both. So, today I suppose I will write. I will open myself to the world to share that an episode on sex has sent me into a bit of an emotional spiral.

This blog admittedly was to talk to someone. Believe it or not as a grown woman, I needed this safe space to share with another being the inner workings of my mind. Good, bad, or indifferent, isn’t that what a blog is supposed to be. A place where you hide behind words and share with anyone willing to listen to all your deep, dark secrets. I know for me it has. Perhaps, that makes me immature, perhaps that means I'm emotionally unavailable. What I have written here for months are thoughts that I have mostly shared with my therapist in confidence and outside of that I keep them to myself because who really cares. No one really cares about my experience, do they? Perhaps, they can relate. Perhaps, there is a blog post that resonates but in the end that was never the intention of this. The intention was with the hope that one day they would see that I hadn’t forgotten, that I hadn’t stopped working on myself, that I hadn’t give up on the notion of love.

I haven’t given up on the notion of love, I feel like I have created a bubble for myself filled with lots of love. Love for myself, love for my children, love for my supports, love for my family even if right now things aren’t exactly where I would like them to be. I have lots of love. But it isn’t enough. We are complex creatures, and we need so much to be able to function healthily from day to day. We need connection, we need love, we need nourishment both emotional and physical and we need to feel wanted and desired. And that brings me to my point of this blog post and what had my mind reeling and why I feel so completely diminished and devoid this morning.

You ever experience something so profound, so life changing that nothing from that moment could compare? The life altering experience that perhaps explains why drug addicts die chasing the high? I have. I am no longer a child, so I am no longer looking for someone to make me feel better in a moment. I am not looking for that temporary surge of oxytocin. I have been accused of only focusing on sex. That all I cared about was the fantasy of something but when it came time to talk about serious things, the important stuff, that I failed. I am no longer in the land of beating myself up for all the things I should or could have done so I won’t let myself head down a rabbit hole of self-deprecation but what I want to share is that for me so much of me was wrapped up in sex because for the first time it had become something more than a means to an end. It had become something so much deeper and no matter what I could do now, that cannot be replicated. It took me a lifetime to figure that out. You can't chase after spiritual experiences once you have had one.

As I listened to this podcast this morning and admittedly, I haven’t finished it yet because I wanted to try and get my thoughts on "paper", but Glennon talks about her experience of Abby, her awakening the day she laid eyes on her. She had no idea what it was or what was happening just that something was happening, and she needed to find out why. And she did, she conquered her moment, her person, her true nature. She embraced it and she became. I thought about something that Abby said about being that magnet for straight women, for having something that appealed to women and while I can’t relate to her experience, I knew exactly what she was explaining because it is the thing that I hadn’t verbalized about my own experience. What I never acknowledged out loud was that she had the perfect mix of female and male energy. It was the perfect mix of everything that I had ever wanted. The tenderness of a woman, the carnal desire of a man. A perfect balance, the yin, and the yang. It was everything in one person.

It took a lifetime to find the perfect balance to understand what I needed and wanted for me. And while the outcome isn’t what I had hoped for I keep discovering so much about me and so much of what I had needed in my life. It isn’t enough to accept the outcome without really digging into the entirety of the experience. It wasn’t about sex or being unable to find the ability to talk about real things. Perhaps, it was not having a real understanding of myself then in the ways that I am allowing myself to have now. It clicked for me the moment Abby expressed herself, I instantly knew. I knew that for me it was the culmination of an entire lifetime of searching. The perfect balance for me. I needed balance, I needed someone who could be tender and rough. Who untamed me, who showed me that there was so much more than a means to an end in all areas of my life. The lesson invaluable.

I have learned a great deal about myself in the last few months. I have learned that life has so much to offer when you aren't so rigid in your beliefs. The greatest lesson though is that I discovered who I always was but was afraid to be for the rest of the world. I was afraid to truly be myself and now that I know what that feels like, now that I know how that can be, I won’t settle for anything less. The lesson is what softens the pain most days. That I learned that no matter how much you chase a feeling that you can’t ever replicate it if it isn’t authentic. So no matter how lonely the days get, I will never compromise myself for mediocrity.