Eponine and "The Middle Place"

I'm listening to "On My Own" from Les Miserables. It's such a beautiful song, and I've known it for years now. It must have felt just as potent for me back when I first heard it in High School as it does for me now, if not moreso by virtue of the youthful lack of callous surrounding my heart. 

I must have been thinking of someone specific every time I listened to it-- who was that someone? How many someones have their been over the years? I know who it is now, and it feels so real and so immediate and so much like today's someone is exactly who it was written for; or rather, that it was written for me, about him. 

But it wasn't always him. It was always me, though-- that much has stayed consistent. Somehow, I need to keep that in mind: I am me, I am here, and I do not fundamentally change no matter who I pine for. I am the constant Eponine to a rotating cast of Mariuses. However it is that you would pluralize Marius.

I had this conversation with his name, his real name, last week with an ensemble member, if you will. His name became this stand-in for an idea-- the faceless person who is wanted. The bitter dream of someone you can't have, whom you revere and hate in equal measure, for how much they inflate you with intoxicating smoke and then never, ever let the tension release from the balloon. 

His name became a code for that person, and all at once, it needed to pluralized. Because so many of us have our Mariuses. 

And it's sick how dehumanizing that is. That I would take his name, the name of this person that I truly cherish, and strip away the fullness of who he is, and make it into a hollow receptacle for an idea, the idea of what unfulfilled people try to fill themselves with. It's sick how casually I can take this name that is holy to me for what I feel when I am with him, what I can do when we're together, and the totality of this beautiful friendship and partnership that we have, and I can, in a moment of anger, reduce him to cliché and loan him out to others like me. 

But that anger is what I wrote about last week. C is obviously the common thread here, C is the name so holy it shall not be typed, C is Marius if anyone is bothering to keep up. So before we go too far back into that very well-explored theme all because I had the bad judgment to choose to play "On My Own" and then start writing a blog post, let's keep moving. I have this whole piece of paper where I wrote down the things that were running through my mind, things I was certain would best be worked out in the form of a blog post. Things I didn't want to lose track of while I took a short break from my angst  to eat turkey bacon while watching twenty minutes of "The West Wing" before continuing to this site. They are as follows:

 

As I understand that it would be the height of hubris to assume that anyone actually cared enough to make it work trying to decipher my chicken scratch, I will transcribe, faithfully, here:

Write a blog post about
    - "the middle place"

    -sexual dysfunction and wanting to give up sex as a force in my life

    -C wanting to stop talking about sex & feelings of rejection that come from that

    -Last night. B. Acceptance. The healing nature of a woman's touch.

Well, this is awkward. Now I have to hold to all that. All because I've become weirdly dedicated to the "meta" style of referencing my writing in my writing, much the way a weirdly high number of Cher's songs mention in the lyrics that it is a song. That always annoyed me.

If I work backwards-- and I'm not fully committing to that yet, I have a feeling this could, in fact, be quite the byzantine path-- it actually provides me with a tricky transition back to my opening thought, which I was worried would go unfinished: "B" is the reason I am listening to "On My Own." A female friend of mine who I have been spending increasing amounts of time with, B was here last night when I invited her and C to come hang out with myself and my husband. (Who I guess is "D?" If I'm going to be posting more often, I'm going to have to come up with some better naming conventions.) 

B is an excellent singer. I am working tirelessly, of late, towards the goal of also becoming an excellent singer...no. "Tirelessly" is wrong there-- it's exhausting. But it's this huge part of what I've always wanted-- the earliest goal I ever remember feeling rejected by: my father was a singer, and I desperately wanted to be, but I was told often and by multiple people that I was "tone deaf." I wasn't. People suck.

I mention all of that because, somehow, it's relevant. It's going to be relevant. The psychological weight of that initial moment of becoming convinced I wasn't good enough to be worthy of something. My first real memory of being ashamed of myself.

It makes more and more sense as I type it. To me. I'll get around to it.

Before I do, though, I should mention that Google Play music has transitioned off of the movie version "On My Own", which it played several times, onto, I think, the Original Broadway cast, and it's clearly the version I had downloaded off of Napster all those years ago. The familiar voice, sung with more compression, a higher larynx than the movie actresses voice-- this woman is less classically skilled and probably the technically inferior singer, but she sounds more like I would have back then. I've learned a lot recently about how to open my throat more completely, but back then, this kind of singer would have been a revelation to me, a rare kindred spirit in a world of open-throated songbirds who mocked us.

 This is a lot. I get it. My whole point is: I have the feels for this version of the song in a sentimental way. Also, the movie soundtrack version cuts off before the final "own" if you're not listening to it in the context of the entire act, and that's just the biggest, shittiest cocktease I can imagine. 

Oh wait, no. I am the biggest, shittiest cocktease I can imagine. But we're not at that bullet point yet.

B, C, D and me (I guess I write as "Elle" on here, so there's a weird coincidence happening right now) were all in my new inflatable hot tub last night. We'd all been drinking, we'd all been smoking, and at some point, she asked us to guess what her all-time favorite "Les Mis" song was. "On My Own, " I said without hesitation. I wasn't guessing. 

"Yesssss!" she exclaimed, excitedly.

"The greatest anthem of all-time for the friend-zoned chick in love with a guy who doesn't notice her." I said in B's general direction, except everyone there knew-- and kindly ignored my drunken humiliation of-- who exactly I was talking to. 

She began to sing the song but struggled a bit with the lyrics, and so it happened that I began to feed her the lines, one by one, spoken in the moments before she would deliver them. 

D told me today that it made for a impressive performance from the both of us, that there was something the collaboration. The reality is, she likely didn't need me for more than a line or two. The reality is, I needed her for her voice.

Because I can't yet sing well enough to do it so freely. I can't yet sing well enough to be over the embarrassment of that young girl, not tone-deaf but forever scarred by the accusation.

...this metaphor goes so much deeper when you know that, I mean. It's going to be tough to parse in a throwaway paragraph....and it probably deserves a more in-depth explanation someday soon. But B has been brought brought on board a project where her job will be to sing my words. And those words are largely about being rejected by C.

It was a good moment. Her singing. Me feeding her the lines. Her letting me feel like I was really a part of it-- I wasn't. But it was a good moment, and an equally terrible one.

"I am large. I contain multitudes." I quote Walt Whitman a lot for someone who has only ever read one line of his writing. 

I am overwhelmed of the enormity of the job I have given myself here-- to make it through this checklist and, in doing so, deconstruct the nature of my relationship with sex, the nature of my depression, the nature of the poison I pour into every relationship that I manage to cobble together. I am overwhelmed by the fact that it is nearly two AM, and I have been writing all day-- I HAVE been writing all day, remind me to get back to that-- and that I have given myself the task of pushing out the cacophony in my head, like air through a tuba, so that I might arrive at some whittled down understanding, some pearl of wisdom...so many battling metaphors and I can't come up with what I'm looking for. Some phrasing that means that chip away at the layers and complexities and tangents, until I have this one, clean, important concept that I can share with other people. I put this up here and rant away all of the asides until I find the essence of what it is I need to tell the people in my life-- and then I can tell them without feeling so much like I am a freight train and they are tied to the tracks.

It reminds me of these files C sends me when we write music together. Used to be, he'd only send me finished tracks. As the years went on, and our partnership deepened, he began to send me these files-- audio tracks where he just hits record and works his way through an idea, repeating the same riff over and over again, clarifying it every time. Sculpting it away as DaVinci did with the stone, to reveal the statue inside-- that's how he likes to talk about it. Like he's letting the music of the universe come to him.

I suppose my metaphor is a bit less delicate. My point is, I would like to relegate my crazy to this blog for a while, and give him and everyone else the highly edited version of me. Anyone who is interested can opt in to the director's cut here-- but I think we both know that they won't.

"So Big, So Small" from Dear Evan Hansen just came on. NOPE. NOT RIGHT NOW. Music off.

I spent all day writing: or, a lot of it. I am currently enrolled in one of the two final classes required to complete my Bachelor's degree. I only need the credits to meet the residence requirements, so it's a total accident that my advisor signed me up for creative writing without even checking with me-- though it's possible I mentioned it to her on a list of "easy classes" that I would be okay with, as I was looking to finish with the least effort possible. 

The first draft of our "final project" was due today, and I had committed in earlier assignments to writing a humorous personal essay in an attempt to get back to my roots blog-writing roots. I hadn't fully committed to the direction the whole thing, all two-thousand words of it, would go when I opened with the following line: "Lately, I have taken to contextualizing my eccentricities with the following confession: I seem to be having a midlife crisis."

Because THAT'S how you start an essay to turn into a stranger for a online creative writing class. 

The whole thing ended up being a somewhat meandering walk through my feelings regarding the intersection of being a mother and being a sexual being, though FAR more straightforward than anything I've written here for a while. I actually continually went back and checked in on what I had written earlier, to be sure I stayed on point and made sure things I referenced earlier actually paid off. Speaking of which...

I'm not quite finished with the initial bullet point, except to explain who "B" was, but I feel like there may be some themes there that are worthy of a separate post, and, anyway, at this point I'll be here until the son comes up if I don't make some headway on cataloging my psychological torment, as I command myself do on the paper.

And resistance to that is futile. It is, after all, ON the piece of paper.

So, onto the next bullet point up, which I think will rather quickly give way to the next up still. We'll get there, dear reader, dear psyche, deer in the headlights. We'll get there yet.

"C doesn't want to talk about sex." This happened recently. A week or so before my birthday, I guess. I had been feeling, prior this, closer than ever to him, somehow. This is BEFORE my last post, clearly. At any rate, I said something to him that was sexual in nature-- I don't think a come on, really, but something that made him uncomfortable, nonetheless. He didn't respond for a long time, but moved on when I did-- then, when I brought up sex again in a relatively short period of time, he responded to tell me he didn't think we should talk about sex anymore.

My heart sank. I tried to play it off, but it was an emotional blow to the stomach-- a wall between us, where I wanted there to be none. An off-limits subject of far and wide-reaching consequence in both of our lives. And, more obliquely, yet another rejection of me as a sexual being.

Earlier this evening, it occurred to me why it had strung so deeply for yet another reason: C is aware, had been made aware, that I am currently seeking a radical treatment for my PTSD in the form of Ketamine-Assisted therapy. Before arriving on this more widely-available option, I had, at great length, sought out the more extreme version, currently only available in clinical trials: MDMA-assisted therapy. The latter is known to be an extremely forthright but painful way to get to the heart of trauma: the chemicals involved allow you to feel safe enough to approach the trauma in ways that you'd never been able to before, but as they leave your system in the next few days, they leave you alone with it, exposed, and needing to push back against the weight of the reality that your mind had once chosen to shield you from. At least, that was what I read on forums devoted to the subject on Reddit.

Ketamine-assisted therapy is said to be a similar, if gentler, process. I'm not sure that I fully understand the difference, but I suspect it's that Ketamine infusions are also used to treat depression for several months at a time. By which I mean, it's possible that the initial process of retrieving the trauma through a delivery of chemicals that allows you to feel safe is the same, but that the Ketamine's effects shelter you from the pain of the trauma for longer after the initial retrieval. 

I don't know. I don't know if any of this is accurate. All I know is, moving forward with any of it is frightening-- and something about the Ketamine's reportedly reliable treatment of depression is the scariest part of all: I want to face the PTSD head-on, but I feel as though I wanted to use that as a starting push on a journey to earn my way out of depression.  

Or rather, to navigate to a place where my brain could heal, physically, enough from the trauma that I began to sleep more and relax more and ultimately feel less depression as s result. I assumed I'd still be depressed-- just, let so, and with fewer debilitating side effects that were really from the PTSD.

That's what I wanted...but this...false-feeling infusion of ketamine and contentment-- that I don't trust. If all of my other reasons stem from a very suspect "impostor syndrome" that I should absolutely pay no attention to for all the sense it makes, then one reason that feels legitimate is this: I don't want to know what it's like not to be depressed for several months, just to lose it again when the ketamine wears off.

But back to C-- he knew that I was going down this path, because I made it clear to him that I was frightened and would be in need of support. So it occurs to me today that what I felt must have been feelings of betrayal that he would cut off my ability to talk about sex write now, in this crucial moment. Except...

Except, that how could I really expect him to understand what I've so plainly internalized about myself as to think that it required no explanation at all: that sex is at the root of literally everything that is wrong with me, everything that I hope to exorcise from my psyche during this process. Every single demon that might come screeching forward from my helplessly agape jaw to fill the room in a loud, swirling cyclone of fear...that is sex. That is where all of my pain comes from.

So I feel like we're pretty well on the "sexual dysfunction" bullet point now.

If it sounds as straightforward as "I don't enjoy sex," well, then you missed the point where I compared it to a whirlwind of poltergeist. And I'm not sure how to get this across in any kind of...I don't know, I'm worried that if I start typing it, well. It won't stop.

But it's not just about not enjoying sex enough. It's not just about the fact that I have to be drunk or stoned to initiate sex. It's not just about how my fixation on C may well be the result of a lifetime spent scarred by every person she I did touch, until my only safe option for sexual expression was for people that I couldn't touch, people who could be trusted to reject me, until that strategy became a pathology, until it developed into full love addiction.

It's not just about how the person I felt safest thinking about, who I spent most of my life fixated on for that reason, is suddenly no longer available to me in that way. When I imagined writing this earlier, I tripped on the fact that he is, in fact, another "C", and I can't believe that that didn't occur to me when I first decided that this "one initial only" thing would suffice for the very few people who feel emotionally relevant to me. This other C-- the O.G.C., if you will-- would be familiar to my loyal readers (if they weren't entirely comprised of my poltergeist) as having been mentioned here for the full nineteen-year run of this blog-- and eighteen years ago, was, in fact, when I first fell for him. So he's not exactly in the ensemble.

Except that he will be, from now on. He's met someone, and...I want him to be happy, no matter what I want him happy. So I'm forced to sterilize whatever connection we have left....

I'm forced to lose the memory of the one person with whom sexual touch ever felt truly safe.

...that's right. I hadn't thought of it before. It wasn't part of my original concept of why I've been breaking down so much lately, making so many bad decisions. But while O.G.C. and regular C may have, until recently, been switching off in the place of honor in my brain of "the man that I feel safe wanting because I cannot touch him," there is one key distinction between them: I have touched O.G.C.. I've been with him. Eighteen years ago, to be exact, and this whole thing started when I realized that I felt safer with him than I ever had with anyone who had ever touch me. "Baptized by his touch", to crib a line from the Indigo Girls.

He and I kissed, and he put his hands on me, and instantly I felt cleansed and renewed and reborn into an understanding of the beauty of sex and intimacy that I would spend the rest of my life...chasing.

And then he told me he didn't want me. And eighteen years, one month and one day ago, I wrote this line in a post:

"Ever been humbled before the eyes of heaven?"

He read it relatively soon, and I remember him reacting to it, concerned and slightly affronted by how over-the-top it sounded. We've referenced it since then, I think, as something of a punchline about how  youthfully dramatic I was...but I wasn't. If anything, I was underplaying it.

Take it from me, Linda from July 2nd, 2002: you had it right. 

...Now I only hope he doesn't read this one, too. But I mean, the chances are WAY lower.

So O.G.C. is gone, more or less, and with him, the only hope I ever really had of being, again, with a man who made me feel that sex could be a pure and righteous expression of love. And everything that is leftover is demons. Swirling, howling demons.

It's not just my addictive feelings for C, and shame as to how that undermines my genuine love for him. It's not just my inconsistent and always inebriated sexual connection to D. It's not just my recent desperate attempts to use online dating to tape over a wound that continues to bleed-- it's not just my shame at having been with someone I didn't know well enough, who turned out later to be drunk during the experience, and who regretted it.

It's not just the use of Instagram to farm validation because I feel like, if I am not sexually viable, I am nothing. It's not just the sudden fascination with new male friends, followed by an almost clockwork ruin of those friendships by my compulsive need to sexualize everything. It's not just being triggered by my son touching my feet because the one only clear example of sexual abuse that I do remember-- although it's obviously not the inciting incident for the trauma-- began with rubbing our feet together while we laid in bed until it became overly profane. It's not just the whole of my pained and beautiful sexual relationship with my ex-husband, all the damage we did to each other, the shame of it.

The shame all of it.

Shame, shame, shame.

THAT is what my poltergeist are made of: sound, and fury, and sexual shame.

...But, like I said. C didn't know that. So now, maybe, I can find a much, much shorter and saner way to explain it to him.

Last bullet point. "The Middle Place." 

This post now is about to break 4,000 words. Lotta words today. I'm gonna break and grab a snack before I commit to this.

Okay. Back.

I texted a friend of mine earlier tonight-- the guy from Tinder that I hooked up with only to find out later that he likely would not have done it sober, except that I missed that he was drunk  (and if you out there in TV Land didn't know yet that I was in an open relationship, congratulations, now you do)-- to ask him if he could relate to this concept that I was stuck thinking about, "the middle place." 

Like me, he suffers from depression, so I expected he'd have a better frame of reference to understand what I was saying and possibly relate to it. He's also very recently sober, which I wanted to check in with. 

The poltergeist,, by the way, interpret this very positive change for him as "sex with you is so shameful that it makes somebody re-evaluate their mistakes. You are rock bottom." My poltergeist are narcissistic dickwads.

I told him that, when I was younger, my depression would make me fantasize about suicide. My strategy for preventing myself from acting on it then wasn't much different than it is now, just less absolute than it has become over the years: I would simply think about the effect it would have on my mother, and resolve to keep going for her. 

Nowadays, when the days get dark enough for the thought to arise, it is that same basic premise, but stronger: I have children of my own now, and my parents are still alive, and the friends I still have, after decades of losing them, have been elevated to a new level of importance.

What this all adds up to is, I don't think about it much in those same terms anymore. Not never, but not as over.

Now, when I am low enough to feel the urge to give up, I think about something different-- a way to give up on myself without punishing others. A "middle place" where I could go-- metaphysically, I suppose-- such that the parts of me that would be needed to live in service to my children and family would be preserved, but that my own sense of self would be stripped away. No more ambitions, no more desires, no more selfishness at all-- a husk of me filled enough emotion that I could still raise my children and do my family duties, and my absence would not be noticed.

I know it's impractical-- any version of me full enough an un-suspicious life would surely be me enough that the wants and dreams and hopes would slip through. But it occurs to me, rather bitterly, that the only thing that has ever really made me suffer is the ambition of happiness.

The guy I texted this to couldn't fully get behind the idea, but I'm still compelled to write some kind of...work of fiction about it. A story or a play. Maybe even a song. There's something here-- I don't know if, in a plot, it makes more sense as a pharmaceutical solution or a literal, metaphysical place where you can retreat to and leave just enough behind. But the idea of giving without hurting anyone-- the idea of unselfish suicide. Surely, that must hold some weight for more people than just me.

It's impracticality weighs on me for the purpose of writing it somehow-- and I suppose that would be the thrust behind the plot-- someone attempted to undo their decision, perhaps, when they realize that, against their only meaningful wishes, they've somehow managed to leave their family as betrayed by their exist as they had given everything to avoid.

...sub-vocalizing the words as I wrote them, I found my way to that inevitable plot twist and began to cry the words I typed out in anguish. Of course, of course this place can't exist. Of course, if I want to live in service to others, I have to do the work of trying to happier, no matter how much it hurts, no matter how often I fall, no matter how much I wish I could simply lay down.

And so I will. As I've declared I have. I'd been e-mailing with a therapist who practices Ketamine-assisted psychotherapy for weeks and had just gotten to the point where a call was more practical.

...but then a lot of things happened. I don't know. I don't know. 

C told me he didn't want to talk about sex, anymore.

I can't imagine it's that clean. I can't imagine it's that obvious. If I look back at the dates of the emails and the dates of that text, I'll find that I am magnifying, intensely, a connection that was minor at best. 

...but for the purpose of this writing, it's a damn good circular reference.

My face is wet from howling out those words. Sometimes, when you do this, you hit upon a revelation of some kind...something you never knew was coming.

That's why you do it. That's why you write yourself a note about the points you want to hit, and then just keep smoking pot and forcing yourself to stay at the keyboard. You can get this out of you, you can get this out of you yet. You ARE strong enough.

The most straightforward translation of "The Middle Place" is wholly impractical. But it was not but a few hours later that, having had a fight with D that seemed perhaps mildly motivated by his frustration that we haven't been intimate recently, I arrived at a more focused version that, if somehow within my reach, I think I might be able to live with: if the ambition of happiness is the only thing that has ever made me suffer, than the ambition of sexual satisfaction, as a subset of happiness, surely accounted for at least 65% of the suffering in my life.

Remove that, I say. Remove that forever. It's clear to me that I'll never get any closer than this to any level of satisfaction that would make me understand how sex is a net positive in some-- most?-- people's lives.

There would be causalities. Relationships that would suffer. D and I may or may not make it through, depending on how we adapted to have his remaining needs met, and whether he could keep them far enough away from me to not infect me, anew, with shame. 

The good news is, my relationships with my children and my parents would be fine. Changed maybe, but I can't imagine any way in which it would be for the worst.

Many of my older friendships have evolved past the point where sex is an important element of the energy between us. Anyone who was mentioned in this blog in it's hey day would be fine.

And no one else really matter all that much...except C.

So, so, SO much of our relationship is informed by, or tainted by sex. And so much of our work is made better, made possible by my harnessing of the endless energy I get from being near him, from wanting to be near him. 

I think, at first glance, he might say it was a welcome change. But I'm not sure he could easily stomach the absolute loss of his most verbal fan. And...I love him, I swear him for what he is...but how much of my perception of what he is has been through the lenses of addiction and desire?

I would never stop loving him...that's what I want to say, that I'd never stop loving him. But as we explored, at length, last week...I'm still not really sure that he loves me at all. And if I lost my sex drive...in one way, or every way, I suspect I'd stop being useful to him.

So, in this version of "The Middle Place", I lose C. Forever. Every other relationship I have is saved or even strengthened, and I live a life of significantly less pain.

But he and I can't do our work. The work...I live for. The one truly bright spot in my life.

And I don't want him anymore, and maybe our friendship can't take that.

...do I take the deal?

"Without me
His world will go on turning
A world that's full of happiness

That I have never known."

On with it.