Naturally the second I open up a tinychat I get sleepy.
Good night, tumblrinas.
Here’s to hoping I have dreams of stuff like this.
blur
I get into this terrible habit of slut-shaming myself when things don’t go exactly my way with guys.
Which is super healthy, right?
That guy from my frat says this weekend is super busy for him. And instead of taking this at face value and being like, “totally, okay, cool, he’s just got a lot on his plate for finals next week” I jump right to, “he doesn’t want to go with me because he thinks I’m trash.”
I don’t know why I go there, but it’s a really strange insecurity of mine. My knee-jerk reaction for a while now has literally just become, “[person in question] thinks I’m a whore and has lost interest”. In my defense, it’s been drilled into my head since like age eight by the patriarchy that if I get around too much I don’t deserve affection. (And you’re not fucking helping either, Taylor Swift, you backwards man-stealing puritan, seriously just because someone’s less pure and nerdysexy and blonde than you are doesn’t mean they deserve a boyfriend).
Sexually open women deserve this stuff just as much as women who make the choice to abstain. I’ve just got to silence the stupid critics in my head.
“I looked at his eyes. I was thinking: they are bluer than the sea.
But then the sea is not blue at all, is it?” – Judy Budnitz, If I Told You Once.
The word passion comes from the Latin stem pati, which means to suffer and to endure. This was, of course, grounded in a very deep suffering on a religious level, but I don’t want to get into that right now.
What I’m more interested is how we use it now. Crimes of passion. Passionate love. Passionate sex. We simply throw this term around without even realizing what we’re implying. Crimes of suffering. Suffering love. Suffering sex.
I feel as if we don’t want to suffer. We don’t want to endure. And rather than seeing love as a means of suffering, we see it as an end to suffering. Which, in my opinion, it is not at all.
I don’t mean to say here that suffering is a bad thing. It’s not. Suffering is a human trait. It’s not necessarily being crucified or tortured or oppressed. It’s not even necessarily a bad feeling. It’s more of just this constant tug that drags us from room to room in life, the constant nagging that keeps humanity yearning, the innate tortured aspect of the human condition that allows us to feel so broken that we need someone or something to share and halve it. “You shall love your crooked neighbor with your crooked heart,” says Auden.
Love is suffering. Suffering is love. It seems we always talk about love as this very comfortable thing. And I mean love on all counts. Familial, religious, romantic, platonic, etc. Love is not benign. Love is not the solution. Love does not suddenly calm the storm, save the damsel, and feed the hungry.
And I think that’s why we get so shocked when love is not so simple and when we can’t just be like, “well, we’re here” and then just sort of close the book on the whole thing. Love doesn’t want to handle us lightly, it would drop-kick us to our knees whenever it had the chance. Love is this wild and crazy creature that is this embodiment of our suffering. So, no wonder love is passionate. Sex, too.
I think that’s part of the reason why I love BDSM so much. Aside from the trust, the control and the pleasure aspects of it, it’s an incredibly powerful physical manifestation of our passion, our suffering. The entire process is one of endurance. From enduring the suffering, you experience the pleasure. That’s a hell of a lost of passion there.
I’ll cut this little rant off right here before I just ramble on forever. But, God, language is mind-blowing.