What You Really Really Want (22 page)

Of course, as much as I agree with Haines that you ultimately want to move into a trigger the way you steer into a curve if you're skidding in a car, you'll want to take good care of yourself while you're doing it. You don't have to do it all at once. If you're dealing with triggers, or suspect this daily masturbation may be triggering, try to let supportive friends and/ or counselors know that you may need them a little more right now. Make a plan for how best to take care of yourself, whether that's upping the amount of time you spend on nonsexual body love, talking it out with someone, or employing other strategies.

“When I get triggered,” says Elizabeth, age forty-one, “I remove myself from the triggering source, then go hold an ice cube in my hand until the sensation of cold redirects my mind. I'll also talk to a friend if there's someone available.”

If you find you need more support dealing with your triggers than this brief section can provide, I highly recommend checking out Haines's book,
The Survivors' Guide to Sex,
and/or the classic healing workbook, Ellen Bass's
The Courage to Heal.
Even if you don't identify as a survivor of sexual violence, these books are a treasure trove of information, exploration, and support for those of us for whom sex sometimes feels emotionally painful.

So. Start your engine. Masturbation Week has begun. Thus fortified by self-pleasuring, let's figure out how to deal with your freaky, geeky feelings. The ones that tell you you're too fat, too skinny, too young, too old, too queer, too trans, too dark, too mixed, too poor, too kinky, too foreign, too inexperienced, too damaged, too weak, too aggressive, too depressed, too smart, too stupid, too successful, too much of a failure, too . . . well, too
too
to be desired in any good way.

We're going to help you heal those feelings not just because you deserve healing, but because living in that place can be unhealthy at best, dangerous at worst. As Zeinab puts it:

Just like our intuition, women's feelings are much maligned. We're assumed to be extremely “emotional,” and our voices and opinions are routinely dismissed because of these much-hyped feelings. This often leaves us with a wary and fraught relationship with our own feelings—especially the “negative” ones, like anger and grief and sadness and frustration. On the other hand, we are welcome to have “positive” emotions, because those always seem to benefit others, don't they? We're admonished to “smile” by strangers on the street, expected to be sweet and cheerful in social situations, and encouraged to never let our
less-than-happy moods show, lest it bring anybody down. In short, be Mary Poppins or any number of Disney heroines.

Becca, age twenty-six, has struggled with her feelings for years: “I have a stubborn belief that I should be able to think my feelings into other feelings. Like, if I don't like being angry or sad, that if I feel strongly enough about it, I should be able to change it. And that's not true. That's been a lesson I've had to learn over and over again. Willpower isn't enough.”

Feelings—even the “bad” ones—can be your friend. They give you key information about what you want more of, and what you've had quite enough of, thank you very much. They can tune you in to moments when you need to focus more on self-care—like when you're cranky and, when you stop to think about it, you realize it's because you haven't eaten all day. They can also guide you out of stuck places you can't “think” your way out of, like a relationship that just doesn't feel right, even though “on paper” everything looks fine.

What's more, there's no cure for them but to feel them. As Winston Churchill once said, “If you're going through hell, keep going.” In other words, our tendency is to freeze up and resist when we feel painful feelings. But that's exactly how to keep them around longer. If you want difficult feelings to give way to easier ones, the best way to do that, counterintuitive though it may seem, is to give those challenging emotions the attention they require. (Sound like the advice on triggers earlier? There's a good reason for that.)

So if you're feeling angry/sad/frustrated/self-conscious about being you in all your freaky geekdom, and not someone
else for whom sexuality seems a whole lot easier, the first thing to do is just feel that. That feeling is real, and it's yours, but it won't last forever. It sure seems like it will. It feels like if you let yourself start crying, you'll cry forever. Or if you let yourself experience the rage that you've been trying to suppress, you'll smash the whole world in. I've been there. I know. And the only thing that ever helps is taking a leap of faith and letting the feeling come anyhow. Given enough time and expression, the feeling always shifts. It fades or morphs or dissipates or mellows or evolves. It doesn't stay the same.

But
how
do you feel your feelings? How do you feel them in ways that are healing and not hurtful? Here are a few guidelines:

Just because something feels awful doesn't mean it's actually bad for you. For example, the idea of moving in with your partner might feel really scary. That could be because it's not the right thing for you, or it could be because it reminds you of some similar dynamic, like the time you moved in with someone else and later discovered they'd been cheating on you the whole time. Or the time your father left when you were a kid.

Instead of thinking of your feelings as fact, think of them as clues that can lead you to something important to know about yourself. Just the same way that physical sensations can mean any number of things—dangerous drugs can make you feel great in the short term, and having a broken bone reset so it can heal can be excruciatingly painful—so can your emotions. Anger can mean that someone has violated your trust, or it can mean that
you're with someone you trust deeply enough that you feel free to experience the full power of your emotions with them. The crucial thing is to pay attention, and to do your best to sort out what your feelings are trying to tell you.

If you're heartbroken that someone you love left you, it's easy to get so caught up feeling angry at yourself for having trusted them that you don't give yourself space to just feel the heartbreak and grieve for the relationship. That's a perfect recipe for staying stuck. If you want to move through your feelings, the first thing to do is accept that they exist. Say to yourself, “I'm feeling heartbroken right now. I accept that.” As they say in
Star Trek:
Resistance is futile.

It's easy to let our difficult feelings isolate us. We fear we'll be judged or misunderstood if we express them to someone. But isolation can make painful emotions fester and mutate and grow. Using your intuition, as well as what you consciously know about your friends and family, pick one or two confidants who you have good reason to believe will handle your feelings with care, and then ask if they're willing to talk. The goal here isn't to come up with solutions, it's to express your feelings and have them witnessed by someone else. That simple act can make them feel more manageable and help you feel less alone. If you can't find anyone close to you to talk with, try
Befrienders.org
—the site will help you find a hotline in your area where you can reach volunteers trained to listen to difficult emotions.

It's fine (and sometimes awesome!) to let your feelings motivate you to act, but emotions aren't a get-out-of-jail-free card, either literally or figuratively. If you lash out at someone, they're probably going to be hurt or angry or both. If you are physically violent to yourself or someone else, there may be real medical or legal consequences. If you blow off work because you don't feel up to getting out of bed, you may get reprimanded or fired.

This is a hard one to undo, because you've probably been taught the opposite over and over. You know, crying is a sign of weakness, angry women are strident harpies, outspoken women are bitchy. Whatever the stereotype, most of us have been dismissed (or threatened with dismissal) because of our feelings. But your feelings can be a superpower! Knowing and embracing them can give you clarity like nothing else, and that's the kind of clarity that can get you to what you really really want, both in sex and in life in general. After all, you can't express your desires or boundaries until you know what they feel like. Think of feelings like a spigot in a sink: There's just one on/off valve. If you close off anger, you're closing off your ability to feel joy and satisfaction and pleasure, too. Instead, open the spigot a little at a time, and learn to manage the flow. The energy of your emotions can be like a power plant for your whole life.

And if your feelings themselves are what make you feel like a freak, well, you're not alone.

If you think of yourself as a little different or off-kilter in ways that relate to your sexuality, or at least your ability to be sexual with a partner, you are not alone. I don't think I know a single woman who doesn't feel that way. Whether you've got a mental illness like anxiety or depression that affects your libido or your ability to deal with people, or you have a history of sexual trauma, or an eating disorder, or an addiction, or your history
has taught you some twisted things about sex and relationships, or even if you have suffered more than your fair share of heartbreak and it's left you twitchy and mistrustful, it's easy to convince yourself you're too “damaged” to find satisfying sexual partners. That no one will want to do the work required to be with you, because they could be with any number of infinitely “simpler” women.

Whatever the case, it's important not to confuse this feeling with truth, and I'll tell you why:

No, seriously. Even that perfect-seeming woman your ex left you for, with the perfect hair and the perfect life and the perfect friends and the perfect career saving puppies from certain death. I'll tell you a secret about her: She's not perfect. When you compare your insides to someone's outsides, it's never a fair fight. In other words, we all try to present our best self to the world. I'm amazed sometimes by the people who think I have it all together. Because, boy howdy, if you spent a few days as a fly on my wall, you'd know differently. I'm not even going to tell you what you'd see, because I'm afraid you'd judge me for it. Which is the point. So when you imagine there are all of those “simple” people out there who are so much less messed up than you, it's at least 50 percent bunk. Some people are just better at hiding their messes than others. And sometimes the folks who hide them well are the most messed-up in the end.

Even so, maybe you have more “issues” than the average woman. That's possible—if there's a bell curve of “messed up,” some of us have got to be on the more-messed-up tail of it. Let's
say for the sake of argument that you are. Well, your potential partners will be different, too. I'm not saying that you should look for someone with similar issues, because it's hard to even make those equations anyhow. But just like there are people out there attracted to women of all shapes and sizes, there are also people out there who find the “simpler” or so-called “normal” people a little boring or unchallenging but really spark with people who are more complicated, or who've lived a little more, or who've had to face challenges and learn how to deal with the real world.