October Modern Lust Book Club: Existential Kink

I missed Modern Lust Book club this month because it fell on my birthday and by the time the call rolled around, I was curled up on the kitchen floor of my uncle's guest cottage,. hyperventilating and itching with hives from the champagne I'd had.  Which makes me sad because I had really looked forward to talking more about the book with people whom I trust to be my sensual-sexual self. That doesn't happen often enough in this life. But these things happen and it doesn't mean that I can't talk about _Polysecure_ with other people. 

This month, we are reading _Existential Kink_ and I genuinely don't think it could have sauntered on to my bedside table at a better time.  It's a relief and revelation to have someone so candidly strip themselves in front of you, and talk about their dark side and how it inspires and frees them. It also reminds me of the work I am continually revisiting that I began with Artie Wu in 2017, as well as the values check-in and inventory that the work with Katie Phillips .  I'm not advertising these people, I'm merely sharing their work as resources that have really helped me come to terms with who I am and where I desire to be be in my life and myself.   A better version of myself? To be sure. But in order to do that, I have to first actually BE myself, you know? And there are so many facets and so many filters, that I sometimes forget we can never know ourselves completely. 

This current book is accessible and thought-provoking: a powerful balance. And it is coming at me at time when I am struggling to not self-destruct.  I am feeling this urge to tear everything I have built down, rip it apart with my bare hands and walk out of my life. I don't know where it comes from but it is a thing in me, this urge to beat myself down, to wallow in being overwhelmed and undervalued, under appreciated. To seethe. To twist and struggle and gnash my teeth into bone and sinew, rip off my own skin and be something beyond human, something feral, wild.  At the same time, I want to curl up into the fetal position and just not move for a century and a day. 

To sit with myself and really interrogate why I go out of my way to beat myself up...it's a terrifying prospect. And to have to acknowledge that it brings me a perverse pleasure just as being the 'responsible one,' the occasional martyr also does. I mean, I know I need to do it, that you can't just slap affirmations like bandages on the open wounds. And clearly, my unconscious is desperately trying to tell me something that I feel ducking, because I am going out of my way try and to NOT feel, which is awkward because that only makes it all hurt worse. 

I spent today feeling bruised and vulnerable and very small. Lost, even.  And that is okay, I tell myself.  Some days, I don't even know who I am, who I am becoming. I think about my profession, about how long I've been doing what I do and how it still brings me joy when I let it. When I allow myself to feel that pleasure. 

I wonder if I ever really have and if I actually need to know...I mean, to be able to continually suprise myself is a beautiful kind of magic, all its own. I want to hold on to that awareness of just how much I don't know anything, as long as I can. But I also feel so bruised, I just don't know how much more I can actually take.