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