i was thinking about Audre Lorde and the erotic today. typical. dog thinks about walks1. as i have discussed before, vulnerability is related heavily to the erotic. invulnerability, a lack of deep emotional sensation, is pornographic. Senseless actions are numb and devoid of depth. furthermore, it is through the erotic that we can make meaningful connections and build lasting community. community building and pro-social behaviors2 are the first line of defense against inequity, hunger, violence, mental illness. the erotic, then, appears ever more important.
how, then, do you cultivate the erotic?
i think for the longest time, i never had a clear or compelling reason why i started Substack. it was good to write. and have an external motive for it. if only to use it as a means for developing an internal motive. to teach myself to want to write. to like it. sort if like an accountability buddy.
i felt embarrassed, i think like a lot of young women (and perhaps that is why a majority of substack writers, or at least those who writer personal essays, poetry, and essay-poems are young women) feel embarrassed by a feeling they feel is ‘attention-seeking.’ i think as women we are made to feel embarrassed by attention seeking behaviors, which is, in part, due to a larger cultural distaste for lacking something. for vulnerability.
i think reframing some attention-seeking behaviors as vulnerability, as a desire for connection, has made me look at myself more softly.
i think i want to write to be vulnerable. i want to be more vulnerable and i want others to be vulnerable with me. this is eroticism.
a couple of days ago now i was overcome by a terrible anxiety. i felt i was spiraling into horror. an Uzumaki moment. at once, i fell through the floor and was beneath Denbigh. fighting for my life. i thrashed and thrashed. but it only made matters worse. imagine if quicksand could be a whirlpool. any wrong move and you’re dead. the problem, though, is that all moves are wrong moves.
i felt suddenly, as i was trying to eat dinner or read a paper or maybe just breathe, that there was something terribly wrong with me. i felt that i was a hack, an untalented moron that had never said anything interesting or original and had only ever blown anything out of proportion. and i overreact constantly and annoy people around me constantly with my blackhole of an ego and boring thoughts and stupid emotions. and i’m fat. fat and ugly and everyone makes fun of me behind my back. and i shouldn’t eat. i eat so much and everyone knows and and they all hate me. for the eating and other reasons. everyone. everyone ever and they’re right to. they should! they’re all praying for my downfall.
by this point, the storm has let up. my spiral is characterized exclusively by self-deprecation and not paranoia if for the simple fact that i don’t keep bad company. if my spiral will get me on anything, it is for being too picky. i don’t keep bad company.
i don’t really talk much about my Uzumaki moments. i don’t like to. i feel like, as i talk about them, they’re ridiculous. and they are. but not because thinking like that is necessarily stupid and i’m stupid for it, but because well. i have one of the many ridiculous thought disorders where my thoughts can be characterized as ridiculous. ungrounded. unreasonable, even.
“verbalizing your problems makes them feel smaller? makes you feel more in control and on top of things in your life?”
whatever. whatever!
i’m not saying go see a therapist, though i’m certainly not dissuading anyone from it either. i think i want to say you should do both. i’m not trying to reinvent therapy. i want to enrich therapy, to add to the experience. talk to a therapist and swap stories with a friend. a friend of a friend. a community member. i fear vulnerability is the basis of good politics, but i’m not afraid to admit my apprehension.
fork thinks about kitchen?
not be a huge bitch (that isn’t the vibe) but i’ve seen a lot of ‘community building’ types who are flat out mean or unfriendly. no amount of mutual aid or protesting will change the fact that you cannot build community if you’re not purposefully friendly and welcoming to others.
I like 'writing for vulnerability' and feel the same. It's weird because on some level I always think my actual online presence is pretty non-vulnerable - I very purposefully write primarily about things I read or watch, not my real life - but my writing is still such an expression of who I am and what I'm thinking about. This is where I express myself besides my fiction writing, which usually doesn't make it to the internet (besides occasionally on ao3. oops.)