Down to the heart of desire

Knowing myself as me

I think about nature and nurture, the knowledge of desire and the things that make us who we are even if we are different and we are different in many ways, but we get along, all the same.

Speaking of desire, I have never thought differently about who I am even if I have questioned why I am who I am. I remember being asked when reviewing the issue of my sexuality with my religious leaders and sometimes with my managers at work whether I have ever been attracted to females, the truth is I have never had that desire, not in the slightest.

Misunderstanding the impossible

I cannot answer the whys or wherefores, but I know that the desire to rid myself of a desire I always had for one I never had was just a recipe for a totally miserable life. That is the complexity of sexuality and the absurdity of conversion therapy.

The idea that you can get someone to totally displace themselves from a desire they have for one they have never had is quite bonkers if not madness. Yet, many attempt to turn people from one thing to another, just because they think they can.

Acceptance is a journey

I guess the bigger struggle is the one of acceptance, first the one of accepting oneself, then the one about others accepting who you are, if they have the wherewithal to. At the end of the day, you are who you are and whether accepted by others or not.

Then at the same time, I observe the conflicts, the confusion, or the conflation of desire, even the fear or shame of the same desire that keeps people from being true to themselves first and then to others. The consequence being a double-life with the opportunities for exploitation and blackmail that makes for a secretive, paranoid, and unhappy existence. Many of us know about this.

Caught between desires

Along the way, there is the cohort that cannot extricate themselves from ambivalence, straddling different aspects of satisfaction of their desires that it becomes fetishized. Maybe I was a bit terse when someone asked if I like stockings and suspenders to which I responded without skipping a beat that I only do it with men.

In fact, I have been asked to dress up and nothing annoys me as much as anyone who expects me to pretend to be someone else for them to get their kicks. At the same time, I have to recognise that it is each to their own and move on. What I cannot completely put out of my mind and memory are times when I have been invited to meet someone casually only to see that in the absence of their spouse and kids, these men are playing the field with ‘taboo’ activities unbeknownst to their wives or girlfriends.

Here I was in a matrimonial home, in their bed, a cot with kid’s toys strewn around the house and well, there is life as you know it and desire as we seek to find it and satisfy it. It is a funny world and the journey to acceptance and being openly happy with it is still a tough one for many to begin, talk less of complete. C’est la vie!

In the gut of surprise

Knowing by happenstance

Surprise as a function of events in commemoration of something can useful and exhilarating, however, when deployed in situations of long-term consequence, whoever is caught on the edge of it might be left nonplussed.

That is the feeling one would get when you learnt of the pertinent which should have been known aforetime and first-hand rather than through the equivalent of eavesdropping. For to be aware of the consequential through the accident of passing conversation directed elsewhere leaves a mind unprepared for the unexpected, removes agency for anticipation and reaction, and is thus unplanned for, even if with hindsight it is revelatory of other matters in flux.

Knowing nothing now

Inexplicably, the frame and structure of words to broach the subject are scarce as to be absent as rumination over days and nights proffers no respite or direction, like a cousin once said of a typical setting, you are left completely discombobulated, totally mixed up and in the dark.

One cannot act in haste and take a deep breath to be calm and in control of one’s temper and temperament whilst hoping some wisdom eventually prevails. Some things are just beyond explanation, that’s just how some things are.

Skipping on lava

Only what I saw

Visited with the inscrutable in language so easily misunderstood, the project takes a chimeral form too nondescript to give shape to coherent thought that you are lost in a labyrinth of dark tunnels with eerie sounds masking the booming roar of a menacing minotaur.

My sobriety defeats me as I approach the caldera of a volcano ready to enter the mouth of the dragon that prances on the fires of the belly of the earth, I am scalded by its breath and starved of oxygen almost ready to swoon into the ethereal nothingness of the end.

In the abandon that ensues, not reckless in the least, we are become Pompeii and in looking back at the conflagration that has begun to surround us, we become the only friend of Lot’s salty wife.

Thought Picnic: Marauding Indecisiveness

Thoughts in a flux

Everything else seems to have been put on hold because of the need of one apparently important issue, getting a job.

Thoughts unclear, pleasure restrained, health plodding along and debts mounting with risks that could be deleterious to livelihood at large.

One fundamental that suffers the most from this is a sense of decisiveness and clear direction; thoughts are rolling over in the mind like a terrestrial animal clutching at straws having fallen into a rapidly flowing stream and just a missed grip or grasp from going under without gills.

For days, it has been do or dare, make or break, decide or procrastinate, save or spend, stay or go – it has become obsessively unnerving that one might just let things flow or damn the consequences.

Life is what you live today and now, apprehensions may matter but they can paralyse you with unnecessary anxiety – a foolishness and irresponsibility once allowed might just be the impetus to be as daring as you might ever be.

This apartment is becoming stifling, the routine does not present objective focus and the ability to think outside the box is like one is really boxed in.

I cannot seem to wear the boot and kick myself up the backside to get on with it.