Speaking Out of Need And Want

Good morning yous,

Happy effin Friday.

The weather's colder, a chill is in the air.  I like this time of year.

It just occurred to me that Thanksgiving is next week.  That's pretty crazy, I could have sworn it was at least two weeks away.  Last night at group everyone was talking about their families and stuff around Thanksgiving.  It seems everyone has their, ehem, misgivings about it.

I certainly have my stuff around it....everyone was going around and talking about their "angst" as we were calling it.  Toward the end of group it was me and another person who were left and the group leader asked the other person to talk about their angst.  They shared about work mostly.  When it was time for me to go, it was at the end of group.  I was both hoping for the opportunity to share about my stuff and relieved that I didn't have to.  Either way, there was a definitive sense of emotional pain I felt and was able to hold while I listened to others share.

The thing about the pain was that it seemed to be self generated in a way.  Like, the thoughts I had were more about whether I should share, whether people will listen, whether I even want to talk about my angst to begin with, when what I felt was sad.  So when it came down to the end of the session, the part of me that was terrified to talk about my own stuff was relieved that I had an out.

I took it.  I said I didn't feel it was a good space or time and that was true.  I could have said something high-level.  But I opted to exclude myself entirely from the discussion.  That in and of itself caused the feeling of emotional pain to grow.  If I had spoken up I don't know what I would have said.  I wanted to keep my pain to myself.  My voice felt so small.

How to speak up.  When to speak up.  When to speak at all.  Most of the talking that I do is out of necessity.  That's not necessarily a bad thing but sometimes I think I'd rather not talk at all.  There are times when communicating with others can be fun.  Parties.  Concerts.  Weekend time.

My mathematical mind wants to group these times of speaking into two categories: speaking out of need and speaking out of want.  I think most of the time I feel I am speaking out of need because speaking at all, communicating, is ridden with anxiety.  It is not a relaxing or calming thing for me most of the time.  So I speak out of need most of the time.  I can do it just fine on the whole, but it's not usually something I look forward to.

There's a party this weekend we're going to and that sounds fun.  There I will speak out of want.  I am looking forward to that.

When I speak out of want, the communication is easier.  It can be fun.  Engaging.   When I speak out of need, communication simply must happen.  When I don't speak at all, that can feel comforting, but if I don't speak out of fear, then I silence myself.  What to do?

And then there's the whole reaching out to people thing.  In order for communication to occur, in order for relationships to be built, one must reach out to other people and initiate contact sometimes.  I feel I am not so good at this.  Or, at the very least, this terrifies me.

I secretly want to reach out to people more, to just have conversations for the sake of conversations, but that want is really a need because I don't do it much.  It's one I don't want to do.  I'd rather observe from the sidelines.  I can tell you everything that's going on, I can speak up if I need, but otherwise, I'd prefer to be on the outside.  Is that true, though?

Sometimes I'd much rather be in the middle of the pack, surrounded by all sides with friends and people I admire.  Sometimes that's the case.  Sometimes I find myself there.  The mystery to me is how that actually happens.

Family is such a basic thing that a lot of people tend to talk about it a lot.  Other people, like myself, not so much.  That's hard for me.  When people talk about family I'm not sure how to relate.  This isn't because I don't love my family, because I do, it's because I feel foreign there.  It's like I was born into this thing and people told me stuff and I believed it.  Aunts and uncles come to visit on the holidays.  Oh, we're related.  Oh, I can see a resemblance.  No one actually has been able to explain to me what all of this is for, though.

What I'm saying is sometimes I have an incredible sense of being here right now but I don't necessarily have a sense of established familial lineage that some people have.  A sense of groundedness through genetic lines.  It all kind of feels random to me, sometimes.  At least the initial roll of the dice.

And, who knows, maybe there's some larger purpose here.  I mean, I tend to believe that this isn't my first go round on this jawn.  In some belief systems, we have chosen this path before we were born.  Now that gets into some heavy heady shit, especially when this present moment can be a lot to deal with sometimes.  But that feels true to me.  It feels true to me that the consciousness that is writing these words isn't confined to just the life of this body.  I can feel the continuity of myself beyond this body.  It feels here.  It is here.  I am here.  That's all I can really say.  What else is there to say?  There is but one.

It saddens me that I have trouble connecting with my family.  It saddens me that I don't reach out more.  My family of origin are there and they are cool and they are people I am genetically related to.  Beyond that, I'm not sure.  They are human and I am a human.

I am alive and am grateful for that.  I guess that's my connection.  My family is my direct connection to life itself.  If I view life as larger than just this body, then my family of origin are just that.  They are humans and I am human and I happened to enter this realm and this time through this specific family.  That feels true to me.

I've expressed this before at group, but it still feels a little weird to say elsewhere because I'm not sure how people will take this: I feel I have both originated from my family, my parents, and also that there's a fundamental part of me that's beyond that.  I am consciousness and they are consciousness.  Physically I was given birth to.  At the level of consciousness I simply am.  Both of those things are true to me.

From the perspective that we are all consciousness, which is essentially the same thing as saying we are all human, I can view myself and my family and other humans with compassion.  From the perspective of birth and family and life processes, I struggle.  And that's OK.  The mental and emotional dirt that humans have to push through in order to get to the light of self is there for nourishment, in the same way plants rely on and push through the soil in order to grow.

So in terms of speaking up, for myself, the compassionate thing to do is to recognize when I want to speak up, when I want to share something with another human.  And then to act on that.  And also to be OK if I don't act on that.  This stuff comes out one way or another, at the appropriate time.

Love,
Casey

We're all Phases of the Present Moment

Dear yous,

Good morning from 4:30 AM on a Thursday.  I've been waking up pretty early the past few days, feeling somewhat active, so I figured I'd make good use of the time and write.

I had a moment of contemplating whether it is worth me to continue this blog.  Or whether it's worth it to write altogether.  I had a 1001 variations on the thought "I'm worthless."

I could go with that thought - I've done it before with other things - and that usually leads to depression.  When I suppress myself, when I don't communicate or don't speak out of a fear of not being heard, then I'm not in a good way.  If I follow the thought "I do not belong here.  I have no place here," then my world will transform into one that has no space for me...or one in which I can find no space.

In this spaceless world, when I walk I feel like I'm constantly bumping into people.  My shoulders are too wide.  The sense that I have of my body is not always what my body is in physical reality.  When I speak, no one listens.  Sometimes the environment works to make this so.  I'll be speaking with someone, trying to say something of meaning, and something external will interrupt, with consistency.  It's like no one pays attention long enough for me to say what I'm trying to say.  I'm  able to make words and sounds but they are disconnected.  It's like my timing is off.  It's all timing, really.

If I'm in my flow, if my life is moving to a nice rhythm and things are flowing, I can see the timing of things.  I can see the gaps between people on the sidewalk where I will walk.  I can see all obstacles in my way, so to speak.

If my timing is off, I can't see a route anywhere.  I am stuck.  Life is a wildly complex, massive moving stream of people and cars and survival needs and who the fuck can really navigate this anyway?  That's how it feels.  In this state, I can't access that realm of myself that feels things emotionally, so I say things that are indirectly related to how I'm feeling.  I can get stuck in the mundaneness of the shitty side of existence: rote motions, food in food out, say this to get that.

I exist.  I know this to be true.  I wake up every day.  I eat.  I sleep.  I do all the normal human things.

If I am fully engaged in the present moment, then my sense of separate self is dissolved in it.  I am moving with the wave of the present moment.  There is motion happening, but no separate sense of "I."

The moment "I" am doing the thing in the present moment, then my experience is no longer directly of the present moment, of the sensations happening, feelings, thoughts, motions, smells, all of the "hard problem of consciousness" qualia - my experience is removed from the present moment by the thought of myself experiencing the moment; I'm experiencing what is happening in reality through the filter of thought, which categorizes and filters the experience I'm having, the experience my body is having in this moment, according to past experience.  This filtering, I've found, is ultimately illusory.  All that mental stuff can play out and at the end of the day I'm still sitting here right where I find myself.

I take this moment to be fundamental.  I look around and I can see that motion is happening.  The motion of my fingers on the keyboard.  I cough.  There are thoughts.  My face is scrunched as I do sometimes when I write.  My cats are half-sleeping, breathing in and out.  And every so often, and this is perhaps my favorite thing about Philly, I can hear the calm whine of the Septa busses as they drive down Broad St. amid the quiet predawn.

So in this moment I, that is the totality of me, including my body, my thoughts and feelings, can either be aligned with the what is happening or not aligned.  When I am aligned with the moment, there is flow.  When I am misaligned, there is obstacle.  The only observable difference in myself between the two poles is timing.  This leads me to believe that we're dealing with waves here!!  Let me explain.

If I'm sitting at a red light, about to make a left turn, I'll probably have my blinker on.  Usually, the cars in front of me will have their blinkers on, too.  If the rate that my blinker flashes is close to the rate of the blinker of the car in front of me, I'll see my blinker and their blinker align for a moment, then drift apart....they'll be opposite at a point - mine on, theirs off, vice versa - then they'll drift back together until the light turns green.  I'm talking here about phase.

In terms of car blinkers, we're talking about two things being related to each other by timing.  The moment that the person in front of me turns on their blinker + the moment that I turn on my blinker + the rate of our respective blinkers = how in sync or how out of sync I will perceive our blinkers to be. 

I take it that life is a very complex version of that.

The moment is fundamental.  I have some independence of motion in this moment via my thoughts and physical body motions but regardless of what transpires out there or in here, I am always this body in this moment.

If I can only control this body and I can only ever be aligned with what is happening now, out of line with what is happening now, or some degree in between, then it can be said that I'm either in phase with the moment or out of phase with it.

When we're talking about timing and phase and rate, then we're talking about wave functions.  In my experience, I've found that viewing life as a giant complex wave feels true.  When I am aligned with this wave, then I'm flowing with it.  There is no separate "I" to struggle against anything.

So back to the thought of "I'm worthless, why do I do anything."  That's just a thought.  It's a powerful one, but it's still just a thought that arises and dissipates over time.  Is that thought any more or less true than any other distinct thing I can point to in my consciousness?

And, also, as far as communicating, I need to do it.  I need to share myself.  And so far, I've found this blog to be a satisfactory outlet.  At the end of the day I'm doing this for myself.  I write this for myself, both so I can communicate in the moment, but also so that I document my journey through some complex trauma and mental stuff.  The words are there and in the words and the timing of the posts is the underlying story, the feeling, the thing I'm trying to say.  And maybe others will stumble across this and find some value, some recognition in the expression.

With love,
Casey

Wheel of Intimacy

Dear yous,

It's been a while and I've been living life.  I'm alive and that can be pretty cool sometimes.

One of the things about being alive is that there's a definitive up and down to the feelings and moods that I experience.  That's part of the thing.  That's OK.

Another thing about being alive is the depth of experience that is possible.  Gurdjieff talks about this in terms of taking impressions via the senses, registering finer and finer impressions as one gains deeper understanding of themselves.  This makes sense to me.

I'm aware that my consciousness is fundamentally the same as it's always been and also that experiences I have day-to-day can serve to deepen or enrich my consciousness.  In other words, I tend to view time not as strictly linear but also circular, spiral-like, whose purpose is ultimately to refine what's already here, not necessarily usher a linear progression from start to finish.  

In this context, then, I'd like to talk about consent.  I'd ultimately like to drive down to the level of talking about consent in terms of relating sexually to other humans and to oneself.  I recognize that for me and others, this can be a difficult topic.  So I'll start broad and then refine.  Normal CWs apply, though I keep it pretty high level.

OK.  In the broadest terms, consent is defined by a quick google search as "permission for something to happen or agreement to do something."   This is wonderfully generic and I have fallen in love with its non-specificity.  Let's break this down.

There is "something" that can "happen" or mutual agreement to "do something."  What this "something" is was not made clear by google.  This is wonderful.

This is wonderful because to view this definition in the negative sense, this implies, to me, that without consent "nothing happens" and there's "nothing to do."  This gets into physics in my mind: inertia.

In physics, inertia is "a property of matter by which it continues in its existing state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line, unless that state is changed by an external force."  

As a living being, I feel a lot inertia.  I wake up and generally do the same things everyday.  When I don't do these things, I feel anxiety.  My body wants to keep its current day-to-day motion going.  

Also, as a living being, I feel like I don't want to do anything a lot of times.  I just want to exist.  To be.  To breathe and have that be enough.  If I move, if I break my inertia of the moment, then I move out of conscious choice, returning to rest once that movement is complete.

This, I feel is fundamental: there exists a state of rest, of existence, in which conscious choice is possible, in which true power is felt.  Power to act out of what is needed in the moment.  In this state, there are needs and also paths for those needs to be met.  There might be worry, but that can come and go.  Feelings can be consciously acted on in the moment or left to dissolve for another time. 

Let's take this fundamental state of rest and make that the baseline.  In this fundamental state of rest I am alive, I am aware.  I am breathing in and out.  I can focus my awareness on only this if I choose.  I can speak or not speak as I desire.  When I respond, I speak from a place of depth.  When I listen I listen with my whole being.  This is the fundamental state of waking existence I will be basing this analogy of intimacy on.  

This fundamental state is a state of inertia in the restful sense.  In this state, I am content to be as I am, where I am.  If I choose to move, I do so with conscious intent.  If I choose not to move, I also do this with conscious intent.

So, if I am in this fundamental state, what will motivate me to move?  If I am content and have all my needs met or, at the very least, if I feel capable of getting my needs met, if I feel an abundance of love and strength, then why move at all?

Of course, there are bodily needs to attend to.  I must eat, take from the environment.  That eating turns into waste products that must be put back into the environment.  All of these things require action, motion of my body.

Let's say I live completely off the land.  I grow my own food.  I am intimately connected to the full cycle of my body's needs.  Maybe a lot of my time and mental resources are concerned with this.  I am connected and relate to others for my survival.  This way of life feels to me to be fundamentally connected with the earth, with life.  I don't live this way currently.

Currently, I live in a city and have the ability to get my groceries Instacart delivered and to have Blue Apron as well.  Even will a full fridge, I can feel disconnected from the food in it.   Takeout is usually the least amount of effort and more short-term satisfying.  In other words, food to me a lot of times is a bothersome necessity.  I must eat in order to keep this body going in order to do all this other stuff that I do in my life.

By why do this other stuff if the other stuff isn't fundamental?  Why do I feel the need to focus on all manner of non-survival things in order to feel better about myself, all the while doing the fundamental survival things out-of-order or just plain neglecting them?  What is my motivation, my drive, my inertia here?  Why is eating a bothersome chore?

I can say with some certainty that my motivation is ultimately survival, but it's survival at the level of connectedness.  I feel such a desperate need to connect sometimes, paired with a desperate perceived inability to initiate and sustain intimate human relationships, that I simply don't do it.  I have the desire to connect with people but often feel like I don't know how, and so I don't.  I do all this other stuff instead.  Sometimes the other stuff is self-destructive.

There is an important distinction here.  I desire human contact and connection but often don't feel I have the agency to go through with it, so I take that desire, that energy and direct it to other things.  In other words, there is either meaningful human contact or other things done to avoid or deal with lack of meaning human contact.  If I could boil down my life to that duality, I'd say that's it.  

OK, so if I have this desire, that's my motivation to move from fundamental rest.  If I have a desire, I can feel it wanting to move my body.  I can feel the actions that will occur to fulfill that desire.  Or maybe I've never done the thing before and I feel like I just jumped off a cliff.  In either case, I feel the desire.  That's the impetus for moving, for doing something different.

I have a desire and I can consciously choose to act on it or not.  This can include suppressing the desire, a mechanism I know well.    Why would I choose to suppress natural desires?  Why does anyone?  Well, that seems to be the culture we live in.  And my personal history lends itself to suppressing my desire for human connection.  This is pretty common, I think.

So I've identified that I have desire to do a thing.  To do "something."  I can feel this desire and then either nothing happens or something happens.  Since my default setting is to suppress a lot of my natural desires for human contact, the something that happens when this desire arises is suppression.  My body tightens and I get a specific feeling in my chest.  I feel small.  I feel withdrawn from the environment.  This happens over and over and over again until it's automatic.  Wilhelm Reich talks about this in terms of body armor, muscle rigidity that forms as a suppressive response to emotion over time.

With this armor, when I feel like I'm operating from this place, I feel small.  I feel like I have no agency.  I can feel this desire but the desire is overwhelming.  It has no outlet and so it implodes inwardly.  It builds over time.  Attempts to overcome this armor, to operate from a different place, are met with frustration, rage, anger.  

In terms of motivation, what motivates me from fundamental rest, desire is the active force.  If desire is the active force, then agency is the gate that either allows that force to continue out into the environment or to flow back into myself.  If I feel like I have a sense of agency, if I feel like I can either act on a desire or not and either choice is OK, then the desires themselves are not a big deal.  They are things that arise in my conscious awareness and fall back out of it again and I am the conscious agent through which these desires move and express themselves.  I am in harmony with my environment.  The Tao. 

By contrast, if I don't feel agency then that gate is closed and then my desires become a seeming insurmountable problem.  The desire for human connection doesn't go away, it just builds and feels impossible, only able to find outlet indirectly, or through use of substances.

In those times that I do feel the agency to connect with others, then the next gate on this circle analogy is the process of connection.  I reach out to you with words or eyes or hands.  You reach back.  Or not.  It's a give and take.  It happens over time.

At some point, being humans, if I am going to really connect with you, I feel we must touch.  It doesn't have to be a big thing.  It can be a hug or a handshake or maybe a hand on the shoulder.  Just some sort of physical contact to make me really believe you are there.  That are you physically there and that I am physically here.

The closer that we become physically, the closer that we become mentally, emotionally, the more intimate we are.  The more I see your humanity and the more I allow you to see my humanity determines the level of intimacy we have.  This may involve more than just a greeting or parting touch.  Maybe we cuddle.  Maybe we're lovers.  

Let's bring consent into the mix here.  I have a desire to connect with other humans.  I feel agency.  I connect.  I feel some level of intimacy.  The connection temporarily ends.  I see you again and we re-connect.  We build more intimacy.  Or maintain it.  Or maybe we grow further apart.  Either way, if we're going to relate at all, consent is required.

Consent is defined wonderfully loosely as "permission for something to happen."  In terms of human relating, that something could well be anything, but here that something is intimacy.  Ultimately, when I connect with others I desire intimacy.  I want to see and hear you.  I want to be seen and heard by you.

In order for this to happen, consent must occur.  There's a protocol that develops.  We learn how to communicate.  We learn our body languages.  I ask you to do things.  You ask me to do things.  We do things together.  We say yes sometimes.  We say no sometimes.  These things don't necessarily have to be sexual but they could be, given mutual feelings and consent.

The thing about all of this for me, if I can be vulnerable here, yous, is that I understand all this theoretical stuff all well and good, but my sense of agency feels kind of broken.  I feel like I've had to create this analogy in order to understand the process of how intimacy happens so that I can move on with my life.  I've spent so much time analyzing and agonizing over this, over my perceived inability to connect with others.  I've since realized the fallacy of my thinking.  I'm human like everyone else and so have the same basic desires for human connection and intimacy.

In order to function as a complete human, I must be able to feel all four of these things: Desire, Agency, Connection, Intimacy.  If any one of these are missing or suppressed, that energy gets diverted to other activities that don't involve human connection.  I think of it like a wheel with freely spinning energy, clockwise in this case.  Each of the circles are gates that must function and be open in order for the whole circle (i.e. me) to function properly.

Desire is the energy that arises that motivates me to move from fundamental rest.  If I feel agency to act on this desire, I can act on it.  I can then connect to my environment.  Through that process of connection I gain some level of intimacy with both myself and others.  

If any of these gates are stuck or closed, then I will feel broken.  If my desires are suppressed - specifically, here, I'm talking about sexual desires - then this filters out into higher level life things.  If my lower level, more fundamental desires are suppressed, this will manifest at all levels of my life.

If my desire is free but my sense of agency is all fucked up, then I will compensate by using substances to increase my sense of agency or to reaffirm my lack of agency.  Either one leads to self-destruction.  

If my desire and agency are free but I am unable to make the connection piece happen then I will be unable to achieve intimacy and will fall back to suppressive patterns.  My sense of agency will weaken.

Even if desire, agency, and connection are all working fine, I've found I can connect with others and not feel intimacy whatsoever.  It feels empty.  I feel I need all four of these "things" in order to feel that I am whole and functioning properly as a human. 

So, really, in this model, consent is required at all levels.  I must consent to feeling the sensations in my body.  I must consent to feeling agency and taking action.  I must act with consent in connecting with others.  Through acting this way I can feel intimacy with others.  Intimacy is built.  The wheel must have all its gates open in order to circulate properly.  

Intimacy is the thing here.  Intimacy can include sex, but it doesn't need to.  What I ultimately desire is human connection and intimacy, which sometimes manifests as sex.  I used to think it was the other way around, that sex = intimacy.

Of course, the direction of energy can reverse as well, so that intimacy is withdrawn.  I believe this to be a healthy part of the process.  There's a winding up of intimacy and a winding down, a back and forth negotiation between humans, moment-to-moment about how to exist together in the same space, about how to touch one another if that's what's desired.  I mean, that's the ideal, in my mind.  In reality, our given conception of this stuff is wildly broken.

I feel like if there was a good model for this stuff, it would exist already.  There wouldn't be so much abuse in the world.  But I look around and I see abusive dynamics everywhere, including in myself.  I feel like we're collectively fucked up about how to relate to one another, especially sexually, which is fundamental to our existence.  To me, it's not enough to say "practice consent."  I need to understand the lower level, more fundamental stuff first.  Like, what would motivate me to put my face next to another human's face in the first place?  Sure, I can ask, I can obtain enthusiastic consent, before putting my face close to yours.  But why the fuck do I want to put myself in that position in the first place and what do I do once I'm there?  That's what I want to understand.

With love,

Casey

This Connection is Disconnection

Dear yous,

Good morning, happy Thursday.  This morning I find myself in a central Jersey hotel room wondering about a lot of things.

You see, I've been doing this same consulting job for 7 years now, more or less, and one of the things inherent to the job is travel.  During the last seven years I've travelled a decent amount, going to places like Santa Barbara, CA and Ireland and Germany, all on the client's dime.  That's all well and good, but there's one fundamental aspect of travel that really gets to me after a while: disconnection.

There's this whole world, this pharmaceutical corporate world, that exists.  And while I've been part of it to some extent since I started on this career path after leaving college, being in this world makes me feel disconnected.

From the moment I walk into a windowless conference room, because that seems to be the default setting for most of my traveling work, I feel disconnected.  I've worked with some of the people here for a few years now and so familiar faces are always nice.  But beyond "Hey, how's it going?" I find myself not wanting to say a damn thing in those rooms beyond what is necessary to complete the work.  "Hey, the printer is jammed again."  "Is the next script ready to execute?"

And so that's what this week has been: endless streams of software testing scripts.  Click here, take a screenshot, check pass or fail.

All of this leads me to the question of why I feel so disconnected in this world.  I mean, I generally feel disconnected, or would say I generally have the propensity to feel disconnected if unchecked, in the world at large.  But there's something about this pharma world I never really clicked with.

One trip, several years back, landed me in San Juan, Puerto Rico for a conference thrown by the vendor of the software we use.  The trip itself was pretty extravagant: nice casino / hotel to stay at, fancy dinners and outings.  One night they bussed us up to this hacienda in the hills where they had more open bars than you could count and cigar rollers and general extravagance.

I ended up winning a over a grand in the slots and so left feeling good about that.  But the other parts of the trip?  Forget about it.  They're like the other parts of any of my work trips: getting through them, alone.  That makes me sad, but that's the truth.

That's why I'm getting out of this line of work: I don't relate to this world and don't feel like I want to relate to this world.  I never understood why or how people interact in these sterile environments.  The most I could hope for is to get decently drunk and chain smoke and then conversation with strangers is kind of nice.

Here on this trip this week, I feel that same old feeling I've always felt on these trips: alone, disconnected, wondering why I'm here and why I have to get through this.

I could have brought stuff to record and almost did.  But the feeling I have after sitting in a windowless conference room all day not feeling connected is one of not wanting to do anything at all.  I don't even want to be with myself.  I don't want to call anyone.  I don't want to talk to anyone.  I just want to keep refilling my glass with the free Miller Lite they have for social hour which ends abruptly at 7:30 and read my book on Reich and Gurdjieff.

Why is it that when I walked into the lobby this morning to grab breakfast to take back to my room that I could feel and see heads turn and eyes looking at me?  I don't necessary ascribe any qualities to myself that cause this: I think it's more a function of how people already in rooms look at people who walk into the room.  This bugs the shit out of me.  Leave me alone.  So I ignore everyone.  I put out that vibe that says leave me the fuck alone which is really just masking the underlying vulnerability of "I'd really actually like to connect but don't know how so I've given up."

I read something by Bukowski the other day where he said when he doesn't drink he has nothing to say.  I can relate to this.  Sometimes I seriously question why I would want to say anything at all, drunk or otherwise.  I don't even really drink all that much anymore.  What's the fucking point?

Connection, I guess.  Connection for the sake of feeling connected.  That one still escapes me.  As far as I'm concerned, sometimes my attitude is to just fucking get through the day.  And sometimes that extends to getting through this life.  I just want to get through this life.  I'll do all the things I need to, but then please let this be over so that I can be left the fuck alone, merged with the infinite.

Whatever, that's pretty dark.  It's not all bad and I can see enough of the bigger picture to know that this is only one particular aspect of myself that has developed a decent amount: the negative, disconnected aspected.  I've fostered that one enough to know it well as hell.

And so, now I want to foster the positive, connected aspects of myself.  I've felt connection and I do feel connected, generally.  It usually feels brief, though, and out of my control.  Connection happens somehow.  Sometimes the environment is such that I can open up and feel connected.  And then that window closes and what agency do I have to seek out more connection?  What does that even look like?

After 7 years of this gig, I've figured out that I don't really want to be connected to anyone in this world of work.  I don't want to share myself with anyone here.  I feel much too large for this world of work and stifled by it.

My hope is that by finding new work, working in a different world, I will want to connect.  I will want to interact.  I will want to share myself.  Day-to-day I want to be around others to whom I feel connected.  Day-to-day now I sit at home, alone, on a computer.  That can lead to disconnection.

Disconnection.  Disconnection.  Fuck.  I have a windowless conference room to go to.

Love,
Casey

Attraction

Dear yous,

Good morning from central / north Jersey.  It's a strange place here, all the pharmaceutical companies and the relatively patient drivers and the U-turns that must be made to get anywhere.

I've been keeping up with this blog pretty consistently for a couple months and that feels good.  I now feel that I've laid enough groundwork for myself to be able to talk about some of the deeper things I have going on inside of me.

I used to believe that in order for someone to really understand me, they needed to know this other *stuff* first - stuff about my history and how I see myself and how what I'm about to say fits in the larger context.  This isn't becoming for conversation and has the effect of being overwhelming to the extent that I find it difficult to connect with people.  And, well, in reality all of that isn't necessary; at the core we're all the same and so my task in communication is more one of translation than explanation; translating others' communications into my own internal language and vice versa.

Hence this blog.  This is my place to write it all out, provide the context I need in order to express how I'm feeling.  In that context, today I want to tackle a topic that has plagued me since I hit puberty.

Attraction.

That feeling that you get when you catch another person's eye or otherwise see and / or interact with another person to whom you feel attracted.  This has historically been a tough feeling for me to handle.

My default response, in that situation, feeling attraction towards someone, is to avoid it altogether.  I don't see you.  You are not there.  I am not here.  I am not accessible.  Don't you look at me that way.  How dare I look at you at that way.  That kind of thing.

Gurdjieff talks about this type of response in terms of "buffers," different "I's" that exist within all of us.  We have all these different "I's" that come out in various situations and take over.  We identify with the feelings and thoughts and then "I am this" or "I am not this."  Between these "I's" are "buffers," rigidity in muscles, energetic blocks, behaviors that keep the I's separate.  I most definitely have an "I" buffer when it comes to attraction.

When I look at the root causes of this in myself, I can point to a lot of things: my religious upbringing, childhood trauma, patriarchal attitudes.  I want to focus on the patriarchal attitudes for now since that is most universal.

I presently identify as non-binary, so I am writing this from that perspective.  I was socialized as male and have lived that way for most of my life, so I'm touching that perspective as well.

The most overwhelming feeling I have when I feel attraction towards someone is actually a two-sided thing:  I feel both that I should exclude that person from my consciousness due to the danger of the feeling and that I need to act on that feeling - either through interacting with the person or most often relieving some of that feeling through other means: avoidance, substances, whatever.

This second part of the feeling I get when I'm attracted to someone, the feeling of having "to do," I believe to be inherent to patriarchal attitudes.  That because I feel attraction to someone or maybe sexual feelings, that I have to do something about them.  And not only that, that there's some sense of urgency to it.  That if I don't act on these feelings I have missed my opportunity and it will never come around again.  I usually feel bad about this and so do whatever I can to shut these feelings out before they start.

The reality of the situation is that these feelings are natural and they don't need to be a big deal.  Excluding these feelings from my consciousness for a long time has caused me a lot of pain and heartache.  It's not healthy to deny oneself.  Feelings arise and then they subside.  These types of attraction feelings don't necessarily need to carry any more weight than any others and yet I still feel trapped by them.

From a non-binary perspective - I see in myself that I don't identify with any gender or can feel either masculine or feminine at different times - I see myself on the same level as everyone else.  Everyone is feeling these feelings in their own way.  The fact that you might be attracted to me is OK.  The fact that I might be attracted to you is OK too.  Nothing needs to be done about it.

And yet, I still don't really feel that's true.  I feel that I have some sort of defect, that I am broken this way.  A lot of my energy, my buffers, are dedicated to avoiding these feelings on a daily basis and that's not freedom.  I'd like to be able to just interact with someone to whom I feel attracted without it having to be a big deal and without having to feel like I need to do something about it; extinguish the feelings, avoid the person, run away, or maybe interact.  But that last one is a hurdle that still seems quite tall.

At the end of the day it's not sex that I want it's intimacy.  Closeness with another.  Sex could be part of that but it doesn't have to be.

And so now I find myself at the curious place of being aware of this stuff and starting to reach out to others, but still a little unsure about how all this stuff happens.  Still a little unsure about all of it.  And that's fine, too.

There's nothing to be done because it is.

Love,
Casey

Enlightenment

Dear yous,

I want to share with you a semi-dream experience I had the other weekend.  This is not your typical dream, and actually I wouldn't even describe it as a dream in the typical sense of how that's understood, of a story unfolding or maybe vague images and dream sensations.  It was more like a mode of consciousness maybe or simply an experience, I don't know.

The actual thing of it lasted maybe a few seconds that I was consciously aware of in the normal waking sense.  I was aware of my body but not awake...but that's not entirely true, I would say I was awake, conscious, but in different way.  It was a space.

In this space was nothing and yet it was my body.  My body was the space but my body wasn't fundamental.  The space was fundamental.  I understood both things to be true.  I am the space and that space also is my body.  The fundamental part of me is the space, which is just one space, a singular space, indivisible, fundamental, unwavering, empty, aware, full space. 

In this space, the unified body-space, I felt ecstasy of the literal sense.  I didn't feel ecstasy.  There was no separate "I."  I used to read about this kinda stuff and be like, whoa, that's some twisted logic and it sounds scary as hell.  But it just was.  Even writing this now, I feel no great sense of urgency to communicate this, like, I can take my time, even though I am excited to share it with you.

The ecstasy was in most of my body, in most of the unified body-space, but it felt more concentrated on the left side.  This makes sense because I broke my right arm pretty seriously a few years back and I think the right side of my body is a little misaligned, out of whack.

Then there were lights, a serious of circular lights going across  my forehead, in this body-space, like the sun, like if you saw a time lapse of the sun across the sky.  It was bright, like the sun, but not blinding and it wasn't separate.  It wasn't a separate sun in this space and there wasn't movement, there wasn't a progression because it was all the space and the space was fundamental.  But to describe it, and remembering it, it was a progression, that went left to right across my forehead.  I take the cloudiness to be the impurities in my body-space, the stuff that still must be worked out.

I felt the energy rush up my left side, across my forehead, the sun progression non-progression happened and I heard a voice say "Now you are enlightened."  It was not my voice or a mental voice.  It was a voice in the space.  I realized this at some point and made a joyful ecstatic orgasmic sound, breath, and then normal consciousness kicked in as a tension.  I think I felt my partner stir.  And at some point they got up out of the bed and I had awareness of the space and physical reality around me at the same time.

There were three levels of awareness that unfolded in an order.  The fundamental level was the space.  The next level is body awareness.  Body in bed, partner stirs.  Groggy, a kind of tug of war between the two.  Little sense of boundary.  Wanting to get back to the Space proper, realizing the inevitable fading.

The third level is awareness of physical reality.  Partner getting up.  Construction of mental world, day-to-day identities.

I've experienced this before at a much slower pace, so I can recognize what this is now.  Space.  Then construction of identity.  I experienced this as a from-scratch construction of the world from absolute stillness, slowly, over the course of maybe a few days or weeks?

Mental conception spinning, explaining internally, but not hooked to anything.  Joy, terror. 

In the Metro station waiting for the train back to Philly, visiting a friend in DC, I catch the eye of a homeless woman and feel the depth and weight of her shame, slow, heavy vibrations in the eyes, light shining thru nonetheless.

"This can only exist because I created this."  I feel responsible for the homeless woman.  Her grief was connected to my grief but I wasn't connected to my grief.  There were manic thoughts.  The world fades and then reconstructs itself again, over and over, in the moment, in the line that forms around me for the train.  The line forms ahead of me, behind me, I am negative space.  I am a bright concentrated point.  I created this.  If there is no separation, then I created this.  This separation is an illusion.  Time is depth, refinement.  Nothing new is ever added.  Nothing is taken.  Refinement. 

I saw it start from scratch when I woke up.  Stillness, then another level of refinement, then another, more specific, then another, like a fractal.  The space became segmented in a fractalic way, one fundamental space, then large blocks, then smaller blocks, then smaller blocks, till something came into mental space that was recognizable, that could be described.  Yes, that's a tree, that's what it's called.  A tree has a sound associated with.  Squiggles on a page.

The structure of things becomes clear.  The structure is body tension moving through space.  Humanity is a connected web of body tension moving through space. 

People have their routines, the same things they do every day, the lines they walk, the papers they read and I was outside of this.  I was seeing the structure, the rigidity of bodies, but I had no body.  I was a point of consciousness.  I was negative space around which physical space moved, independent of time.  What occurred now wrapped back around me and through me in all dimensions to meet that occurrence.

I don't feel agency.  There is no me.  There are thoughts and 3D visuals.  They are not hallucinations.  I understand that I am seeing reality from a higher dimensional space.

If I can see my shadow in 3D space as a 2D projection, then my 3D body must be a projection from a higher dimensional space.  Without time there is absolute. 

My friend opens the morning paper on the train and the page is blank.  The words appear as he reads them.  I experience the reality of that paper appear for him.  I can see him read what I understand to be the "newspaper" and that's in my reality, but the words on not in my reality.  The words are squiggles.  They are patterned symbols without inherent meaning.

As my friend reads, the words appear and the meaning appears.  I feel fear.  I feel body tension.  It's recognizable as typical news headlines.  But my body is all of the bodies of the people in the train car.  It shifts, it moves, it's dynamic, it's a wave.

I get back to Philly and have a therapy appointment.  I arrive on time with no agency of my awareness.  That office did not exist before I arrived and though recognizable, it constructed itself as I arrived, just in time, in perfect time with everything else.  Fast movement, gross movements into slower, more subtle, refined movements, till stillness.  I sit down and open a magazine and the words appear as I read them, on a blank page.

In therapy I try to explain my experience of being 5D but the thoughts are manic.  There are too many levels for the true communication to get through and the communication is fundamental, it is now.  It is the thing.  I am that.  I am this.  I am not confined to three dimensions.  You're looking at me like I'm crazy.  You look concerned.  Everybody always looks concerned when I try to explain this stuff.

Today, present day reality, I had a powerful orgasmic experience.  I cried afterwards.  I wept.  I felt the tension in my face melt.  I felt my abuse event(s).  I felt strong physical tension,  tension in my neck, at the base of my neck where my head meets my spine.  I feel this to be the place I retreat to, the source of some essential tension in me.  The absolute horror and withdrawal without escape.  I felt that but was not in it.  I was OK.

There is no language, I am sublanguage.  I feel shame.  I feel shame pass.  I take a shower.  I am ungrounded.  I squeeze some shampoo out of the bottle in my hand and that is comforting.  I've done this before.  The pattern of identity reconstruction is much faster now. 

The neighbors upstairs banging still triggers me, the repeatative motion, the frantic nature of it.  I think it's because it was the upstairs neighbor who did it, who abused me.  Or there was an upstairs neighbor home, making noise while it was happening. 

I have band practice tonight.  I feel excited about that.  My identity has been reconstructed.  I've gone outside myself and back.  I am the Space and I still have to do the dishes, so I will do them with joy in the recognition of this.

Love,
Casey

Indirect Control

Dear yous,

For the longest time I would struggle to play a song the whole way through.  I mean, I could do it, but it took so much ENERGY and so I was exhausted at the end.  There were so many things to manage: playing the right notes, singing on pitch, people looking at you.

Part of the thing is that I never really practiced songs the whole way through.  I took a more superstitious approach - if the environment was right, then I would naturally open up and could perform and feel great doing it.  I'd practice everything around the songs but never songs themselves.  I'd record songs, but rarely sing or record full takes.

I realized I feel the same way about intimacy.  I can only stand little bits and then I have to either escape or alter myself to feel better about it, because intimacy feels like death sometimes.

The thing about intimacy that feels important to me is the aspect of continuity.  Music is an intimate thing, watching someone perform, playing their heart out, or playing your heart out yourself.  It's like, can you trust that I'm going to influence the way you feel by projecting myself, literally, out into the room.  Can I trust that you'll accept me?

When I watch someone who is nervous and worried about hitting the wrong notes, I can feel that.  It's hard to build continuity.  When some is relaxed and just playing, the space fills with that energy. 

In interacting with others this weekend, I felt a sense of continuity on all levels.  Interactions felt continuous rather than discrete.  What I mean by that is my interactions with others usually feel tense and "incomplete" as if there's something more to do or say.   When I feel continuous like I did this weekend, my actions and interactions feel complete.    Each breath is a breath.  Each word is a word.  And I'm at a lever deeper than those things, connected to the environment and free to interact.

It's a process of opening and closing, preferably with intent, preferably with defenses appropriate to the situation, which may be none at all.  Lately, I've really been feeling this.  I've opened up but it's hard for me to maintain.  It's too bright.  I feel too powerful.   That feels burdensome.  If the environment notices me, I have to deal with it.

So, like learning to play a new song, you play it crappy for a while and mess up the words.  Play it 100 times and you don't have to think about it anymore.

I feel like that with intimacy at the moment.  I can kinda play the notes but I feel like a little scratchy violin student.  Open up, withdraw, open up.  I guess I don't need to be so extreme about it, but I still am realizing my power in this aspect.  I'm still acting out of the superstition.

If I can control the environment, then I will be OK.  I think that's a pretty universal way people handle things.

With love,
Casey

Acceptance

Dear yous,

I find writing to be a cleansing activity, but it's slow.  It's like Prozac.  It takes a few weeks for the plasma levels to build up and then suddenly there are words on a page and they connect and flow and things are good.  Side effects include emotional outlet, feelings of freedom, satisfaction.

This weekend I had a bang up time and am now feeling sad for the fact that it is over.  Sometimes particularly intense or intimate moments can leave me with with a hangover of sorts in which I feel the vacuum of mundane existence sucking me back down into wanting to be along again.  I don't now, it's not all bad. 

We had a gig this weekend and it felt great to play and then hang out afterwards.  And then get bunch in the morning.  I had long, drawn out moments of feeling myself, just OK to exist in spaces with other people, OK in my body, OK to talk or not.  Felt pretty fucking great. 

Plus, we went to an invite-only event at a person's house downtown last night.  The place was filled with artists and musicians and the types of people I resonate with.  I felt so at home there, just listening to the performances, watching occasionally, but mostly listening.  Feeling the space.  Being there, feeling the air on my face.  Feeling OK in my body and uncomfortable at the same time and feeling OK with that.  Being with my friends.  Feeling like there are communities of people I belong in.  It was beautiful.

Love,
Casey

Good Spaces Make Good Connections

Good morning, yous - and happy Thursday to ya.  It's a clear 52 degrees in the city of non-binary love and you're listening to Casey Kills Jobs on Radio 104.5.

Well, I'm broadcasting from the radio in my head, anyway....which at the moment is looping through a song I've been recording recently.  That's what happens, usually - record, record, record, looping starts, get burnt, recover.  I love it, actually.  But could stand to be a little healthier in the process.

At any given moment I'd say I usually have a song looping around in my head.  If I don't, it feels strange.  Music is my safety mechanism.  It's where I go when I don't feel safe, when I'm unsure.

I heard an interview with Josh Homme of Queens of The Stone Age and he was talking about an accident or something he had, a life event where the music in his head stopped.  And he was distraught about it.  I hear that cuz I've been there.

When the looping is just music, especially my own music, when I'm working on a song, singing vocals, doubling them up to give it that nice Elliot Smith vibe, then life is just grand.  I feel ALRIGHT up to here with smiles all around.  That is my place.

I feel safest singing into a microphone.  And on my own songs, the place my voice has, the space it occupies is a space that I create.  It's a beautiful place to be, and also sometimes a very lonely place to be.

On the topic of spaces, yous, I wanna talk about what space means to me.  Not outer space the final frontier.  Inner space.  Body space.  Room space.  Consciousness space.  Allowing others into this space.  Allowing yourself space.  Interacting with and in others' spaces.

When you walk into a room, any room, there is a field of possibility that exists.  If the room you walk into happens to be the red-curtained one in the original Twin Peaks, then there's some weird shit going down and the possibilities of what can occur - how the environment will respond and how you respond to the environment - are going to be confined to that weird little space.  The little bellhop will start talking backwards and then the show ends for 20 years.

Normally the spaces I walk into are not that weird, most of them are pretty mundane.  My apartment.  Stores, restaurants, friends' places, parks, gardens, sidewalks, roads, cars.  When am I not in a space or dealing with the issue of space, living in a city, living in society?

This issue of space is one I feel very deeply.  In my experience of the world I either have no space or have all the space.  I guess I like to be the center of attention.  I like the stage!!!  I want you to notice me but then I'm not really sure what to do after that, usually.  So I keep to myself.

The reason I feel this way is because I've had my space violated at a young age, my body space, my spiritual space.  My sense of self did not develop in a healthy way.  My sense of space is distorted.  I experience distortions of scale where people far away feel close and threatening.  Almost all energy can be threatening at various times.

When I speak of space here, I must recognize that there are two related, connected, yet distinct spaces: internal space and external space.  Well, and we can probably further distinguish between physical internal space (your organs and stuff) and mental internal space (thoughts, feelings, emotions).  I'm going to talk about the latter.

My internal space usually feels small or non-existent.  At some parts of my cycle it can feel as large as the earth at least, or larger than myself, who knows.  Sometimes I feel like a mountain, steady, sturdy, a rock indistinguishable and inseparable from its environment.  Sometimes I just feel like my normal self within the confines of this body.

How I feel of my own internal space determines both how I respond to the environment and how the environment responds to me.  When I say environment here I'm referring more to people, interactions with others', though I have experienced the environment proper respond in a larger sense, what you might call God and which I prefer to call Consciousness proper.

If my internal space is small, neither my body nor words can seem to find a space anywhere.  When my space is beyond myself, I perceive that others are threatened by me.  Or maybe I am threatened by everyone.  I feel super aware.  I feel like I could rip you to shreds psychologically on one hand, if I needed, and on the other hand I can feel the most overwhelming sense of compassion and love for everyone.

So if my space is small, I am threatened because the world appears larger to me, as if I was a kid.  I experience this in a real way sometimes.

If my space is large, I am threatened by others because I perceive, correctly or incorrectly, that others are threatened by my presence, that my expanded sense of self awareness makes others feel self conscious and so I feel self conscious and the whole mirroring thing starts.

When I had a psychological break several years back now, it was my awareness of mirroring and body language that really freaked me out.  I suddenly found myself in this massive moving, undulating, writhing, wave of human existence and I didn't really feel part of it, only observant.

It started when I noticed that sometimes while out drinking I would take a sip and others would do the same.  Or I would unconsciously take a sip as well, mirroring and reacting.

If I feel no sense of space for myself, though, then I can only observe reactions but have no sense that "I" am the one either being the mirrored or mirroring - in other words, there's motion but no one's doing the motion.  Emptiness.

For me, in those initial moments of waking up to this stuff, the void, emptiness was also filled with my swirling anxious thoughts about what was happening, always calculating what to say next, acting out of a set of rules.

Those rules were explicitly designed, or maybe it's more accurate to say that those rules explicitly developed as a means of emotional protection.  By ensuring I never really connected with anyone, by keeping my emotional distance, I could feel safe, I would *be* safe forever, so it seemed.  I could be myself.

Fast forward several years and here I sit, aware of my mental rules, slowly deconstructing them, slowly living a more authentic life.  I'm aware of the root causes of a lot of the self destructive patterns I have and so now am longing for a space to connect with others on this stuff.

I have fostered several safe spaces for myself.  Some of them are empty - like my office.  Some of them involve other people, like group therapy and a masculinity group focused on healing.  Some of the spaces exist as relationships with other people.  I value all of these spaces highly.

If I can be honest with you, yous, it's that I'm struggling a bit.  I have all of these great external spaces and a better sense of internal space now, that's great.  I feel like I'm making progress.  But there are all these suggestions of starting groups on my Facebook page, to connect and relate about healing from sexual trauma, and I'm not sure where I fit in.

Part of that unsureness is I'm realizing how the labels we use to classify sexuality and gender apply to me...or kindof.  I'm confused.  I feel like I know myself.  I know my authentic self.  The labels are merely descriptors, tools.

If I'd have to classify myself with these labels I would say with regard to gender I'm agender or genderfluid, meaning, first of all, that I see gender as a social construct, and second that my authentic self is non-gendered or my sense of gender can vary.  Meaning I feel feminine sometimes and masculine sometimes but most of the time I don't feel either of those two.
 
With regard to sexuality, I would identify as demi-pan-sexual.  This means that I only really feel sexual attraction to people I already have an emotional connection with and the gender of that person doesn't matter to me.  There's also a distinction made between sexual attraction and romantic attraction and those can differ for some.  For me, they're mostly the same.

So, yous, all of this is new to me.  The labels, I don't care about so much.  I take them as helpful descriptors to help me find others who have similar experiences, to help me find safe spaces.

Part of the thing I've been struggling with recently is where I feel safe opening up about my sexual trauma with others.  Not in a "here's my trauma" kind of way but in a connected, grounded, healing, supportive kind of way.

It's like this: I probably feel safest in female-oriented spaces but can sometimes feel unsure, at least initially, of whether I belong or whether my presence will be threatening, as male presenting.  I feel safe in the masculinity group, but unsure about really opening up about my trauma.  The truth is neither a space focused on masculine energies nor feminine energies feels completely OK for me.  It always feels like one half of the waveform is missing.

So, I guess, let this be a prayer.  I believe in the power of offering up wants and desires to the general Internet because I see it as a conscious thing, ultimately comprised of humans consciousness, so:

Dear Consciousness,

Please help me be productive and healthy and connected to others.  Help me live from a place of compassion for myself and all beings.  Please take all these mental details and anxieties from me so that I may live a healthy, productive life.  And please help me find a space where I feel I can truly open up again, in the larger world.

Love,
Casey

I see you glowing...are you toxic?

Dear yous,

It's been a little while and that's alright, cuz I've been living life.  Playing music.  Recording music.  Eating.  Working.  Sleeping.  Hanging out with friends, all that life stuff.  Some of it's been pretty fun and amazing.

I have to tell you, though, and this is my reason for writing you today, yous - I'm a little heartbroken, feeling some of these feelings around all this stuff going on with "me too" and sexual abuse / assault in the news and on Facebook.  This may be a CW but I talk mostly high-level about it below.

OK, let's start with the positive.  On the upside, I think it's amazing that this is being discussed publicly at the level that it seems to be.  People are coming forward with their stories and there is light being shed on the issue.

In some ways, I feel like I should feel good about this, because now this issue that I've had no words for suddenly has a lot of words around me, but of course, we're dealing with the topic of sexual abuse, and so no aspect of that is really easy or fun to deal with, in my experience.  Well, that's not true.  There is another, more positive side to it, the healing side, and that's the side I'm aiming for here.

There have been reactionary posts I've read where there is a "we men" kind of mentality.  That stirs a reaction in me.  It feels dangerous.

And to be clear, I'm not talking #notallmen here, I'm taking about comments like "we men need to shape up" and "what are we going to do with this toxic masculinity that we have?"

Again, here, I feel like I should feel good because there are words pointing to real things and real problems, but for me this doesn't go deep enough and, at the end of the day, it's the fact that these two example sentences encapsulate the very thing they are trying to expunge, that gets me.

It's the idea that there is something to be done and that this necessity of doing is inherent to being a man.  Furthermore, the doing in this case is to rid the self of the toxic nature of....itself.  In other words, if I identify as a man, which I have personally for a while, then I feel this overwhelming sense of having to "do something" about myself and my feelings, mostly the sexual ones.  My self as a man is eternally struggling in manhood to either be a real man or to rid myself of the toxic things that go into being a man.  That's a real shaky place to be and so that place we call fragile.  Weak.  And so the cycle continues.

Now, the thing is, I don't really identify as a man.  I reject that, consciously.  To me, that is not fundamental.  I am consciousness.  I am whole.  I am complete.  I am right now.  I just fucking am.

And so are you.

And so we all are.

And there are different "we's."  Some of the we's are not compatible with each other.  But this is not fundamental.

"We men" is really not compatible with "we women."  "We women" is a grouping, I feel, of survival, of necessity.  If out in the world you experience constant bombardment of eyes and slurs and hands then to group with others who have this experience makes sense.  It's protection.

If in the world you experience the ability to sit at a bar and talk to your buddies about the serious 10 at the corner, then "we men" in this case is a grouping that ensures you continue to have that ability.

The thing is "we men" are on the power side of the social dynamic even if we don't want to be or choose to be or even if we feel powerless most of the time, as I do.  The whole point of this side of the power dynamic is to keep this power dynamic going.  And power dynamics are built with language.  And, shout out to evolution and nature and all that stuff upon which this is built, don't want to deny our animal nature here, but we're not at that level, any longer, you know?

I present socially most of the time as a white male and so when I walk into a room, that's what most people will see and that's the assumption most people will act from.  The power is given me by others simply by how I look, how I was born.  I am not comfortable with that.  In others' experience of the world, their power is taken simply because of how they look, how they were born.  I am not comfortable with that either.

This is what it all boils down to yous, that burnt, calcified deposit on the bottom of the tea pot you left boiling too long, too many times: it's power.  Boogie woogie woogie.

Power, power!  What the fuck is this thing we call power!?  I don't know, yous, I'm feeling a little exhausted at the moment talking about all this stuff.

Really, what I want to share, if I can be vulnerable with you for a minute, is that I don't know where I fit into this whole thing.  I am not "we men" and I am not "we women."  I am "we non-binary" maybe, but I don't know what that means entirely, yet. I feel like I've tried to be "a man" and have failed, only succeeding in abusing myself for my failure, mostly with socially acceptable substances an in socially acceptable ways. 

And I'm not "me too" either, in the most recent Facebook sense, tho that feels closer to the truth.  I'm not "me too" because this particular social campaign is focused on women having the chance to speak up about their experience, and I have not experienced life in this way.

But I am a me too in the sense that I was abused as a kid, I have sexual trauma in my past.  The diagnosis is Complex PTSD.  I like that because I feel complex af.  And also anxious most of the time.  So there's a grouping I'll take.

So here's the fundamental question I'll leave with: how does one effectively use language to heal the traumas the language itself, and thought patterns built upon it, are perpetuating?

With love,
Casey

Do I Trust You?

Dear yous,

Fuck off.

I'm sorry, that came off a little harsh.  What I meant to say is that I probably don't trust you all that much, by default, if we haven't met before and interacted...for at least a few months.  Maybe a few years.

Intimacy is slow for me.  And "Fuck off" is kind of my default mode.  By default, you are not to be trusted until I know you're not gonna hurt me.  That you will respect my feelings and boundaries.  This world does not respect boundaries by default, and so I have to try extra hard to make sure mine stay intact.

If you violate my boundaries, I probably will stay away from you.  I probably won't say anything.  In my mind, I'd really like to scream "Fuck off" in your face, but that never really happens.  The best I can seem to do is to scream anything at the top of my lungs, mostly when I'm alone...or maybe walking down the street, because it's OK to scream on the street here.  I like that a lot.

All this fuck offery, obviously, of course, is not becoming in terms of establishing relationships.  That's my problem, yous, is that I'd really like to get to know some of you on a deeper level, but my fuck offery won't allow it.  I put up a huge barrier up front and if you stick around long enough you'll see past it.  Or another way to put it is if I can trust you to deal with my fuck offery long enough, we can become deeper friends.  Whatever.

What I'm really trying to say, yous, is that I feel just as defeated and depressed as I have been - I can't seem to shake the thing despite little moments here or there.  I am alone most of the time and when that happens it just takes too much energy to reach out.  To make an effort to connect.  So here I will be until something external comes along to change it or until I change it myself.  Who knows.

Part of me isn't worried.  I've been here before.  I will find a new gig for money, and that will hopefully be good for a while.  I'm getting married.  That's good.  Lots of good stuff in my life.  But, of course, the external stuff doesn't so much matter when the internal stuff is shitty.

If you've read this far, yous, then we might just be friends.  You put up with my front long enough to see that I'm really feeling vulnerable, unsure of how to deal with these feelings.  If nothing else, I reached out this way for the day.

Time to give myself a fucking star.

Peace,
Casey

Because Jesus Said Some of You Suck

Dear yous,

I went to Outfest yesterday and it was cool.  Probably the most surprising thing I saw were the Jesus people rattling off calm, God-backed words of damnation.

I mean, I guess I'm not surprised that they were there.  It would be almost weird if they weren't.  But I honestly don't get their whole jawn.

That's not true.  I get it.  I understand the reasoning.  I understand the belief structure.  I grew up with that.  The thing that really gets me is that it's just so *invasive.*

If you asked the Jesus people why they were there, they'd probably say they're looking out for our own good by preaching the good word.  When your belief structure makes it OK to go into other people's spaces and let them know that they are not OK as they are, that's motherfucking invasive.

Of course, Jesus people have the legal right to be there like everyone else in a public space like that.  They'd probably argue that queer people are an invasion of their space.

But man, we're all humans, yous.  We all gotta deal with the fact of being human and all the day-to-day things that must occur in order for life to continue.

And you know what, yous, in the spirit of the whole thing, I'll just come out and say it: I'm bisexual.  I'm genderfluid.  Non-binary.

And you know what? WHO THE FUCK CARES?  Why do some people care so much what I do with my body, huh?  If you care enough to let me know unsolicited, then you're invading my space.

The more troubling thing to me is the culture of abuse we live in, that normalizes invasion of other people's spaces, that silences abuse victims and silences the oppressed, a culture that's heavily divided, that doesn't see itself as same.

THAT's gonna fuck me up way more than what I do sexually with this machinery that god gave me.  According to your rules, Jesus people, what your god gave me is shameful, and must be hidden, and must be attacked.  Where's the logic in that??

If you really want me to be healthy, Jesus people, healthy and happy, then you'd be better served with signs that said "Eat Healthy" and "Exercise Regularly" and "Love your neighbor as yourself." ...you know, as Jesus said.

Love,
Casey

The Structure of Freedom

Dear yous,

This is my writing from yesterday.  I'm only doing it to get a sticker, see.

I have a daily habit going, a writing habit, and I give myself a sticker, a smiley face or a star, each day I write.  Imagine the days of the week, all 7 of em, laid out as a circle.  Each day is a circle and each day I write I get a sticker in the circle for the day.  At the end of the week, if I got 7 stickers, then I get a big sticker in the middle and maybe a reward (still figuring that part out).

I - or I should say we - my partner and I have a few of these going now.  One for playing a song every morning.  One for meditation.  One for yoga.  One for gratitude.

So far it seems to be working.  Have 5 consistent weeks of playing a song every morning and 4 weeks for the others.  Now I look forward to these things when I wake up.  It's some sort of structure.

I guess that's one thing I've learned: lack of structure <> (does not equal) freedom.  Living with no structure is hard and freedom is a mental thing.  And too much structure <> safety.

The problem I had was that I had all this structure but no idea why it was there or why I was living in it.  So I gave up the structure....and now starting to build my own.  Structure, in terms of day-to-day life, really boils down to habits and thoughts.  Mine have developed into some pretty unhealthy jawns and so now the work is to reprogram myself.

So even though, technically, I didn't write during the day of yesterday, I'm writing now.  And so that counts.  And I'll give myself a star for today, because that counts as well.  And, yous, give yourself a star today just for being fucking alive and making it this far.  Cuz sometimes that's hard, you know.

Love,
Casey

The Continuity of Things

Dear yous,

What's up?  I just quit my job again.  And I'm starting to feel that joy.

For me, this is a deep issue.  I mean, you know, jobs = survival in this capitalist reality.   So....people have stuff tied to it.   Or, I do, anyway.

The reality for me is that I'm only in this job because it was a direct result of me calling a random temp agency in the paper one day after leaving college.  Got hired.  Promoted to corporate.  Became consultant.  Quit for a few years (kinda).  Back again.  Quitting again.  Leaving.  Changing my path.

I mean, the job itself, the career advancement, some of the travel, the flexibility, all that, that's good.  And I've enjoyed the perks of that well enough.  However, the perks in and of themselves are not raison d'être.  And it's terribly isolating working at home, especially if you struggle to reach out to people sometimes.

The job itself - the industry, as a heavily regulated one - entails lots of detail orientation.  I'm on the regulatory / IT side of things.  Or will have been, I should say, come December 6.  The devil is in the details, they say.

Now a funny thing just occurred to me, thinking of the date December 6: though this year Dec 6 falls on a Wednesday, next year it won't.  The funny thought is that time is continuous.  The breaks, the jumbles, the fact that Dec 6 is not a Wednesday next year is not fundamental.

What is fundamental is continuity.  Life is continuous.  Details are not continuous.

The first time I quit my consulting gig, I did quit officially, on paper and in an email.  But in my mind, I always knew I could go back.  So I never really left it.  And so here I am again.  That's kinda how it works, I'm finding.  So now I have a date.

And what happens next, I have no fucking idea but don't really care either, in the sense that I'm letting it go and enjoying the feeling of freedom.  I am not worried.  I have confronted much more fundamental fears and this doesn't measure up.

And the truth is I have skills out the wazoo.  I'm autodidactic.   I would even say I'm an autodidactic polymath.

What I really want to do, yous, is music.  That's why I quit in the first place.  I even blogged about it at the time.

Then, I didn't really know music in a way I could describe with language.  I could play by ear.  I could hear what comes next, but didn't know why.

Now I have a language.  It's the common language - the common western theory - I get that just fine now.  But it extends beyond that.  I've developed my own visual language to understand music.  Plus, to talk myself up a bit, I have enough skills in that area, enough level of mastery - writing, playing, performing, recording, theory - that I now feel I can rely on these skills.  Music has taken care of me, now I can take care of music in my own way.  Keep it going.  Keep it healthy.  Contribute to its continuity.  Be part of a community.

That's the thing I really struggled with, yous, the past few years, the past all the years: it's yous.  Other people.  I didn't understand myself, my motivations, fears, desires, and so I didn't understand others'.  You can operate at the level of society without really connecting to anyone, without really understanding the underlying meaning behind language and human relationships.  I feel like I understand the fundamental reason now and am grateful for that.

(It's survival)

(Ultimately)

(But what isn't?)

Peace!
Casey

P.S.  And of course, in moments of true connection with others, sexual and otherwise, the experience, I've found, is far beyond anything language can describe.  It's fundamental.

Collective Crazy

Dear Yous,

Yesterday was weird.  Another massacre, this time in Las Vegas, and I'm at a loss for words.  Like, how do you talk about this stuff without starting up all sorts of debates on gun control and whatever?  It all seems crazy to me.  We all seem crazy, collectively.

Now, I have cred, official crazy cred.  I know my crazy and I know my sane and the world around me, by and large, feels way more like my crazy than my sane.  In fact, I will flat out proclaim that I inherited this craziness from the rest of the world, like everyone else.  It is what it is, but I at least can seek to change my own crazy mind, which spins and spins negative thoughts like that its job.

I saw a TED talk the other day.  The speaker personified their inner critic and made friends with it.  They said their critic will never go away.  It will always be there.  I agree.

The crazy I own will always be there.  The potential for my mind to spin in that direction is always there.  Trying to get rid of it, fighting it only makes it worse.

Now, I see the same crazy on the national level, the global level, as I do inside myself.  My thoughts are specific to me, but the underlying mechanism I see as the same.  In fact, I don't see a multitude of separate mental conditions as the DSM would define it.  I only see one condition, the human condition, and it is the same for all of us, manifesting in different ways.

How do we exist to begin with?  What's all this about?  Yous, I wish you could tell me, but I bet you don't fucking know either.   Why do we exist?  How do we exist?  And how do we exist together, sharing the same space and resources?

There are, of course, 1001 methods for existing, getting on with day-to-day life, connecting with others, etc.  But take away your system, take away some of the lower level things maybe you don't think about most days - food, shelter, water, intimacy - and I bet you'd start feeling crazy, too.

Live in fight or flight long enough and that becomes your world.  There are plenty of our own citizens living in poverty, struggling day-to-day as their existence.  There are plenty of people who, day-to-day, get shit just for not being white.  Or male.  Or straight.  Or able-bodied.  Or any group other than what our society favors.

The thing that always gets me, though, is that the people living in this country are mostly our own fucking citizens, but we treat them like they are other.  Privilege, to me, means not having to worry about that.  To live in a bubble where the bad side of town exists, but it's safe enough being far away or safe enough riding thru in my certified pre-owned.

And even the people here illegally are still fucking people who must exist day-to-day.  Now that may not be anyone's individual responsibility and it's easy to slink off with that excuse, but I say it is our responsibility, collectively.  Why can't we fucking have healthcare for everyone, huh?  Please tell, me, Yous, because I fail to see why we wouldn't want to help humans as humans.  Why must it be unbalanced?  Why do we not see ourselves as ourselves?

Life is what it is.  We're born into what we're born into.  But man, at some point, will enough of us wake up and look around and go, "wait a second, what the fuck are we doing here?"

I don't know, Yous.  Hope you have a good one.

Love,
Casey

The Truth ver. 2.05

Dear Yous,

I'm writing because I often don't know who to talk to about this stuff - you know, about feelings and life, and just generally how to interact with people.  That's the irony, the catch-22 of it all - in order to get over stuff around interacting with people, you actually have to interact with people.  No amount of theory or reading wikipedia is going to give you the answer on that one.

The truth is, too, that I recently watched The Perks of Being a Wallflower again.  It's my second time seeing the movie and I'm working on reading the book again, too.  That's not such a huge truth.

What actually is the huge truth is how much I relate to that story, and how I wish I'd found it earlier in my life.  But I guess I wasn't ready.  I could have read the words but they wouldn't have meant a damn thing...or they probably would have, but I would have connected it to something else, something indirect - and cried just the same.

The other truth is that I'm inspired by the story, the writing style.  Writing letters to an anonymous friend.  That's who yous are, Yous.  All of my anonymous friends and probably real life friends, too.  But I am not who I am in real life here.  I am my real self here.  Not that I can't be in real life, it's just that I can only seem to be my real self in waves, in real life.  At certain times, if the conditions are right.

You know what thing I realized recently?  Is that I don't have to react to emotions.  I always thought I did.  Whether they were mine or other peoples', I was simply a ping pong ball being bounced back and forth between responses, unsure of their meaning and what, if any, place I had in the whole scheme of things.  What power do I have to react without being squashed?  Well, I guess anesthetizing myself gave me that power sometimes.

I have a lot of innate power, it turns out, but that power must be built from daily habits and positive thoughts.  Well, I guess power can be negative too - sometimes it feels moreso to me than not - but here I'm talking about the power to change myself, to make meaning out of this existence, to stop focusing on myself so damn much.  I have a black hole inside of me.  A lot of other people do, too.  I would even venture to say that all people do.  Hey, we're all gonna die, right?

Morbid!!!  But you can't escape it.  That's the truth.

On a positive note, I quit my job again.  I may have told you before, but I quit my consulting job four or so years ago to pursue music.  And then I just joined back on again for another project and am at "that point," six months in.  I can't take it.  The mundane monotony of caring about details I don't care about.  Mind you, my mind loves details, but it must be focused on details that matter to me otherwise I'll burn out and self destruct.

Iso.  Lation.

I'm sure you understand, Yous, cuz apparently we all gotta go thru a lot of the same things from different perspectives.  The connection is empathy.  That's what connects our different experiences.  If I can see past my own shit while we relate, then I can see the actual you, and see you in myself and vice versa.  And then it's not so bad, you know?  It's not so bad.

The mundane shit doesn't matter so much.  It is exactly what it needs to be.  Mundane shit that's best spiced up with some good music in the background.  Good thoughts spinning on other things.  Let the work fall out as it will.  It's gonna happen anyway, you know, and I tend to feel the struggle is necessary.  What's it just like to relax?  Into it all, into the struggle, into the glory of letting it go, into touching other people, into being touched.  And hey, that's not even such a big fucking deal, probably the most normal thing of all.  Human touch.

But when I am isolated, I may feel as safe and stable as an isosceles triangle, protecting a side of myself that I make smaller than the others - the side of myself that's happy to be alive, that appreciates human connection, that trusts in the relative tolerance of it all - but if I'm protecting that side from harm, then it never comes out and I never feel balanced, whole, connected.  Equal.

When I am connected to other people, I am OK.  When I am connected to humanity, I am OK.  And so that's why I'm writing Yous, in this way, in this form, because it feels safe.  I don't need to protect myself as much this way.

Sometimes the truth is best handed indirectly, you know.

Love,
Casey