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
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