darcieanne

I'm leaving on a pilgrimage any moment now.  It's terrible and exciting and terrifying.  When I was growing up family always felt so stable.  It felt like the connections and communities I had would last forever.  Now I feel as if my family has been unraveling itself steadily for five years.  tumbling in turmoil.  after the loss of my grandfather, the illness of my mother, the disconnection from my Virginia roots, the divorce, the steady decline of my father, nothing feels as if it has a place anymore.

I'm going to try to reclaim some small sliver of the security I once felt.  Wish me luck.

I wasn’t sure what to address next until carriejane asked me two very simple questions.

Are you saying that sex is always emotionally charged? That there is no such thing as sex being only sex?

It occurs to me that I can’t continue to discuss the nuances of sex without getting a bit into my theories of personality.  For my therapist friends, I’m sorry about the long explanation you don’t need.  For my non-therapist friends I’m sorry about the long explanation that doesn’t interest you.

            I think of personality as being organic like a tree, but shaped by force like a bonsai, so for the sake of this discussion that’ll be my analogy.  Of course, the problem here is that bonsai’s are small, and I don’t want their comical tinyness to distract, so try to imagine this tree to be the size of a large elm or something.  Huge, majestic and whatnot. 

            Part of personality is genetic.  Are you an elm?  A maple?  A sumac?  There is no way to get around this, but biology is not really my strength.  I tend to think that DNA is also like a tree in that it has thousands of little GATC’s making up our double helixes.  Personality is innate and shaped.  The experiences you have, the environment you are in, and the parents you have all shape who you become.  The environmental factors are the bonsai part of the analogy.  Each small experience you have puts slight pressure on who you are and alters it slightly.

            We therapists are prone to referring to clients privately as ‘broken’ in some way and I do mean literally that their personality has been broken.  Though I don’t always believe that has to be a negative fact.  In some cases something small happens, like you sprain your ankle at the beach, this is like having a twig snapped on one of your outer branches.  It will change the way some few leaves and maybe a neighbor branch grow, but all that will happen is that you are now wary of walking in sand.  On the other hand you may see your father murdered.  This will break a major branch, twist the way it grows and fundamentally alter the way your personality develops.  These events are the bonsai of who you are.  These pressures, gentle and rough, are part of the organic process of living as sentient beings.

            Question one, am I saying that sex is always emotionally charged?  I am saying that sex always (to the best of my limited biological knowledge) causes a physiological response that mimics emotion.  Or if you prefer, causes emotion.  It will stimulate a bonding response in some part of your being.  The strength of this reaction, your response to it, will be determined by your physical makeup and your personality.

            As I mentioned before, sex is like pain.  It has a physical component and an emotional component.  Some people are able to block their mind to the psychological effects of pain and endure huge amounts of it without much discomfort.  In a similar way some people are much more prone to feeling the bonding response than others.  Whether or not you, personally, are prone to the bonding effect will be affected by hormone levels, and life experiences.  Sex is almost always emotionally charged because it is emotionally complicated, but the degree to which that is true is very varied.

            Question two, am I saying that there is no such thing as sex being just sex?  I am trying to talk about what sex is, not what it means.  What sex means is individual.  I think that sex is a thing biologically tied to emotional reactions.  I don’t think that there can’t be sex for sex’s sake.  Some will have sex and instantly fall deeply in love, some will not feel comfortable having sex without the already existing feelings of love.  Others will be able to have sex, feel the pleasant feelings that follow, and never really feel the bonding aspect.  Every individual’s approach to sex will be tied to the genetic aspects of your tree, and the bonsai effects of your life.

            This is why I do not believe there is a good answer to ‘the one night stand’ or ‘open’ relationships.  I believe that through honest self-exploration, emotional reflection and safety each person must ultimately decide for themselves what amount of relationship they need to include in their sex.  It is not our place to tell someone they must only have sex after marriage and only marry once.  This is not necessary for some people, but what is necessary is your call to make, not mine.  And, of course, your right to enforce.

Lately I have been working with a teenage girl who is around the age my eldest female cousin from ‘that side’ of the family was the last time I saw her.  Fourteen.  It’s such an intense age, and there is such a wide range of maturity levels from individual to individual.  Do to the terrible, crushing, timely death of my grandfather I no longer have to ability to watch my cousins develop and age.  I miss the milestones, and I used to flatter myself that I had some influence on their progress.  I wanted so much from them.  They’ve  become fixed in my mind at the general age level of my departure from their relevant existence. 

With the introduction of this age-appropriate client I’ve been forced lately to think of what I have missed.  One landmark I imagine I would have wanted to influence is ‘the talk’.  There are so many pitfalls in the world of sex, and I hope to hell they get good advice on navigating the difficult transition from virgin to sexually active.  My client is trying to negotiate those waters now, and it’s like seeing the oncoming crash and the slow-motion disaster at once.  She’s looking at me, telling me she’s having sex, and wants to know how a fourteen year old can have sensible sex.  Fuck that.  I have no idea what to tell her, and what I want to tell her I know I shouldn’t.  It’s all a bit much.  I want to know what I should say, not so much for this one, but for the next 30 years of clients who are going to ask me that question.  I need to know what I think of sex.

And now, my mission statement.  I’m going to use livejournal to write my ultimate sex-ed manifesto.  My hope is that it can be a dialogue with the people in my life who talk to me about that sort of thing.  Partly I will be examining sex and sex development from my point of view, partly I will be asking those around me for their views and thoughts.  If you read one or two of this and thnk “Oh, this is just Darcie having a boring monologue that’s uncomfortably personal” then please, please don’t read them.  If you think “wow, Darcie has actually succeeded in creating a dialogue about the biological, feminist, psychological, and social aspects of sex and my buddy guya would so love to read this” then please tell me who you are referring me to.  For the vast majority of you who will find it mildly interesting enough to skim, sorry I’m so self-aggrandizing and long-winded.  So, class, sex-ed has begun, be sure to ask plenty of questions because participation is part of your grade.

 

Chapter 1:  sex and emotions, the biological and psychological fallout.

Sex and pain have a great deal in common, both are largely physical events that trigger huge chemical releases into the body that ‘force’ an intense emotional reaction. (Yes, that means I think there can be ‘healthy’ S&M, but that’s another chapter.)  In the case of pain the body reacts to the damage done to it by causing alarm, fight or flight adrenaline reactions.  You get anger, fear, anxiety, stress, depression, all sorts of emotional reactions to an essentially physical problem.  Sex is the same.  The body responds to stimulation of the sex-organs by causing a flood of hormones related to bonding, and well-being.  This causes feelings of happiness, love, elation, comfort, and all sorts of sickening hallmark moment feelings.  I have no idea why this leads to baby-talk.  Someone else will have to explain that phenomena.

The end result of this is that you suddenly find yourself looking deeply into the eyes of that friend you agreed to fuck out of boredom and comfort and imagining the house you’ll retire in.  Someone you used to only talk to when Lost was on now inspires you to want to cook for them and laugh at their lame star-wars jokes. 

This is normal.  This is why it is so vitally important that the entire holistic experience of sex is addressed.  It is not enough to tell teenagers that “the penis goes into the vagina rapped in a condom and sex is something only grownups should do” and expect them to grow up prepared.  Multiple relationships are difficult on the psyche, one night stands are difficult on the psyche, monogamy is difficult on the psyche, sex is complicated because applying logic to the situation will not work, and following your emotions will not work.  Sex is nuanced, and must be taught as such.

Stuffy nose, sore throat, light headed, minor fever, slept 4/5ths of a day.  Oh yeah, I may be sick.  crap.  I just hope this batch of adorable little bastards with strep throat managed not to spread it to me.  The other batch were able to keep that shit away from me.  Whew.  I am loopy.  and overheated.  Will this mean a day off?  We can only cross our fingers.

and there it is.  Life.  That great huge crushing weight of reality.  I hate you pavlov.  House's pager just went off and it took me a full minuet to stop looking for mine.  Sigh.  The day started off on such an up.  About half way through the day when meg offered me another full-time job while we were pushing filing cabinets when I should have been having a meeting with a dartmouth representative who didn't show up I began to feel my luck slide.  There it was, work, clients, crisis, my life, drawn out and set down where I could see them fully.  I think I set myself up by unpacking my suitcase last night.  I had a weird feeling of finality.  I guess not that weird.  The theoretical 'big deal' of the day was actually kinda neat.  Then I was suddenly way behind in work, my mother is having a nervous breakdown, matthew's family troulbes are keeping him away from me, I got lost in the woods and muddy all over, there's nothing for dinner, I can't pay my health insurance bill and the dog ran away again.  Then, I have a quiet moment, am watching a show that I love and Kristin calls to tell me Dad has a lung infection Claremont hospital won't treat for three more days. He says it hurts as much as when he broke his ribs.  And I put my head in my hands, looked down and thought my god, my thighs are huge.  Oh life is back alright.  now I'm gonna have to call him tomorrow, congratulate him on his upcoming grandbaby, play good daughter.  Fuck it.  I'm keeping the sex though.  I've gone too long without any confidence to go back to not wanting sex.  Goddamn life.

I guess what happened is that this morning around 5:30 Faith's vomiting woke up their mother.  Faith's been relying pretty heavily on weed because it kills the nausea long enough for her to eat a few bites of food and fall asleep.  Unfortunately, she's been low on leads this last day or two so faith had been throwing up non-stop for most of the night.  She's been doing this for about a year.  She lost a job because she couldn't stop vomiting at work.  No one seems to entirely know why.  One of the big reasons she moved home is because she was no longer able to support herself due to all the uncontrolled throwing up and uninsured medical bills.  So lisa took her to the hospital in keene.  The doctors there found a significant amount of air in her torso and guessed that she had a hole in her esophagus and sent her to Dartmouth.  After a full day of tests they determined that she does not have a hole in her esophagus, though there is pretty significant damage from years of vomiting.  She still needed I.V. fluids again.  For the second or third time this month.  She was looked at by all kinds of specialists and it was determined that she would need to stay the night for observation.

What an ordeal for matthew.  His baby sister is in the hospital.  These two haven't always gotten along, but when a sibling can't stand up due to excessive vomit you tend to view your relationship on slightly different terms.  That seems normal to me.  Seems healthy.  It's only natural that matthew would be having a distracted and poor day.

So, matthew, his father and I are driving together having just dropped a car off at the garage and I ask if Faith's extended stay at DHMC means that they are going to take another look into what causes faith to throw up in the first place.  Tom answers that they probably will, and she has some follow up appointments with experts and all, but really, after so many years of an eating disorder... maybe this will scare her enough that she'll stop doing it this time.  WHAT!?!!?  Years of WHAT???  You've known about this for How Long? and you've done WHAT about it, exactly?  And could you please, for my sake, sound a little worried and concerned instead of just put-out and annoyed?  I mean, honestly, how could a girl from such a supportive household with such loving parents ever develop an eating disorder?  That's the problem with tom, I can never tell if he's using bravado, exaggerating, drunk, a narcissist, or some combination of these.  God only knows.  F.Y.I. tom, if I hadn't hooked up with matthew he would have been a compulsive thief/serial killer by now.  I'm not sure which.  Grace was lucky enough to get good meds, and it's probably too late for me to help faith, but I've got my eye on thomas too, and before you can say "negligence" he's gonna be out of your control.  God help any kid who tries to be a teenager in your home.

I'm not expecting this to work at all.  This attempt is simply intended to prove to myself once and for all that my computer has utterly rejected livejournal as a viable tool for communication.  I don't understand it.  My computer has never shown such blind prejudice before.  Well, except for the antioch page, and come on, that's not prejudice so much as observation.  Well, time to hit the preview button and dash all hopes.