Delusional Writing Sesh

On dance performances, heart break, and unions

Photo by Hulki Okan Tabak on Unsplash

1

Even if you don’t make it to the end, don’t forget to hit the heart at the bottom and share a lot. Comments are so nice too! This one was hard to share. I posted, took it down, and posted again.

I’ve been trying to write something real for a while now. By real, I mean, something that feels honest and good. We might call that art.

I’m also so tired, I feel hysterical.

Last night I went with a few new union friends, cari ann and Gwendolyn to see another new union friend’s dance performance at LaMama Theater. It’s called “Center for Fiction: This is Not May ‘68” directed and choreographed by Patricia Hoffbauer. Five years in the making, it was a joyous, hilarious examination of what it’s like to teach, dance, and try to make social change while holding onto and critiquing some of the most important theorists of our time (Lacan, Freud, Charcot, Preciado). It runs through Sunday and you must see it.

I felt very seen while watching because it’s about teaching and so much of the theory that we Gen X academic creatives were brought up on, and yet it was entirely new and thrilling because it has the wild, constructed chaos that performance art and dance can under the direction of a genius woman. Pat (as I’ve come to know her) danced and performed with former students, dancers closer to our age and older, and made use minimal and surprising costuming, music, and found footage. It was freeing and thoughtful, and zany in the best way possible, and it spoke directly to the difficulties of being an aging woman teaching and making art.

Pat was one of the first people I connected with when I started organizing in the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. At the time, Tisch was considered a tough turf, and anti-union. With the help of a crackerjack team of other organizers (cari ann, Gwendolyn, Chris, Anne, and Caley), we eventually broke through the few bullies and liars and found that we had far more in common than we’d thought. It turned out that many of the Tisch women were burned out, underpaid, and overworked.

They’d been lied to for years about the nature of their jobs and the union. In the beginning of this organizing all I did was call and text people who mostly ignored me, but eventually Pat texted me back, and we started talking about our lives as single moms and artists working for NYU. Pat turned pro-union pretty quickly and she started to talking to her colleagues. I would have likely given up if it weren’t for my early connections with Pat. She was also willing to publicly speak out too, which is always a big ask, and scary to do.

Seeing her performance last night (and even getting a union shout out at the end) was a full circle moment for me. In deciding to dedicate the last year or so to a lot of union work, I’d consciously set aside any big writing projects because I knew I couldn’t write a book and do union work while teaching and being a mom. Though I’m starting to think of organizing as it’s own art form, I’ve missed writing essays and making art. Pat’s performance was a call to me to return to myself and art making in general. She inspired me last night to be wild again and to tell the truth in all of its bodily complexities.

2

My body is in various stages of collapse. My eyes are so dry and unresolvable, that I tried a cure I found on Reddit. I put my testosterone cream on my eyelids. So far, not so good. Now my eyes are more irritated. This dry eye thing has been going on for maybe five years at this point, and I’ve been to ten ophthalmologists, who have offered many expensive quack remedies that don’t work.

The guy I have now is not a quack and even though he’s considered the dry eye guy, he’s stumped too. Last time I visited, he offered up new prescription drops that mostly don’t work and I can’t wear with contacts, and mused about how much better my eyes would be if I lived in the Caribbean. He suggested a cranial x-ray to see if I have sinus obstructions. Dry eyes are a serious problem for menopausal women, and guess what nobody has solved it. I haven’t had the energy to arrange the cranial x-ray.

Other chronic ailments of mine include Dopa Responsive Dystonia, bad cervix cells caused by HPV because my insurance wouldn’t pay for me to have an HPV vaccine because I was over 47 when I asked for one and apparently you have to die from having sex after 47 because you are a hag whore. Now I have to get a colposcopy which is not a colonoscopy but that will maybe have to happen soon too because I’m having an IBS flare which means I’m farting the worst smelling farts and I feel queasy every day after I have coffee.

My shoulder hurts, and my left arm still won’t fully extend from elbow dislocation, but I was able to lift weights this week for the first time since it dislocated in December so that’s nice because I need the endorphins.

My flesh feels like jelly. My brain forgets so much, I wonder if I have ADHD and if I’ve always had it or if this is just menopause. I need to have gum surgery because I have a hole in the back of my mouth.

Like most disabled and chronically ill people know, figuring out one’s body, going to doctors, scheduling appointments, and figuring out insurance is another whole job. It’s also incredibly boring and artless. Or maybe I’ve yet to find the art in those procedures. I do like many of my doctors, and I don’t mind the strange places new doctor’s offices sometimes take me, but this work is frictionless against the institution and has little joy to it.

3

My boyfriend of a year and a half recently broke up with me over the phone a week after we said we loved each other. He’s a cis bisexual poly Park Slope dad my age, who was very good at giving me orgasms, buying me food, and getting high with me. I can’t decide if this was a high or a low bar for making me happy. Food I didn’t have to make or buy, orgasms, and pot. Seems not too hard, and yet he was a rare person who was willing and diligent about these tasks. Also, he was not stupid.

In exchange, I offered hot takes, a lot of jokes (I can really make you laugh if you’re catching what I’m throwing—not the right phrase but that’s what my brain just told my fingers to type), incredible smarts, an aging but flabbily hot squish body, and great sex. I wish we could talk more openly about being great at sex. It’s subjective to a certain extent, but it’s also a skill—a way of giving, caring, playing, and working that we don’t value enough. If we did, we’d probably legalize sex work.

I might have maxed out on this whole dating thing and I admit (evidence above) I do see the whole system as transactional.

Anyway, what he was throwing I was catching and I did allow myself to eventually feel something like what I remember to be a love adjacent, but no longer have access to because I’m on SSRIs and so my highs and lows are blunted. As many of my SSRI people know, this is good because you don’t want to kill yourself every day, but also not as fun because you can’t be manic and feel like you’re falling in love and you will explode from the excitement and fear of it all.

Also, I let him meet three of my friends and I told my mother about him, which means the break up was inevitable. Usually about a week after I tell me mother about something good in my life, it goes to shit because then she can say something helpful like, “Well, your brother is not going to die,” or “You never know what’s going to happen.” I haven’t told her about the break up, because we’re in good place, and I’m trying not to rage bait myself as the GenZers like to say.

Photo by EESOFUFFZICH on Unsplash

My ex-boyfriend’s (let’s call him Mario) beefs with me were “not poly enough,” “wanting more than he could give,” and sending grouchy texts after a night of fun. I think these are all true, though I don’t think there’s anything that wrong with my actions.

My beefs with him were, and I’ll express them here like a normal person and not a personal essayist:

He wasn’t a good communicator, though he seemed like a good communicator. We talked about quite a lot feelings (mostly mine), which he said were totally fine to have, and even encouraged in me. He was always like, “No let’s talk about your feelings. Your feelings are valid.” I can’t believe at age 53 I still fell for this cis man trick.

Live and don’t learn. Put it on a pillow.

A somewhat narcissistic obsession with making me come. Like you know when you’re in the middle of something and you realize I think he’s getting off on this way more than I am, which is fine. He’s closing the orgasm gap for all genders all over BK. Pleasure doms amiright?! Thank goddess for them, but there was something mechanical about it sometimes that made my heart hurt, which probably led to me to get stoned and eat a lot in his company. Or those are just the fun things to do when you’re dating and old.

Didn’t read the existing literature on being poly/ENM. I have this complaint about almost every poly person I’ve been with in the metropolitan area. There are books and if you read them, they are quite useful. Like it’s actually not true that if you’re poly you should never feel jealousy, and only compersion.

While some people feel joy, compersion, and are turned on by their partner having sex with other people, other people may feel a complicated mix of jealousy, compersion, and wanting to be involved in some way even if they aren’t actually involved.

There’s a big problem on Feeld (for the luckily uninitiated this is a poly/ENM dating app) and in the likely limited poly worlds I inhabit, which is play people just want to have fun and fuck and do what they want to do without feelings attached and then there are maybe a smaller group of people who want to play and fuck and have feelings, and never the twain shall meet. Or I can’t get them to meet up.

In retrospect, Mario is maybe a long-term play partner person, while I’m a long-term play feelings person. I’m mostly too tired to have sex with more than one person or at a time unless it’s the summer and I’m not teaching and Summer Carley (TM, TM) comes alive. I’m probably what the older gays call mononogamish. Dan Savage coined this term and not to be a cunt about it, but I’ve read the literature, and he did name what lots of gays have been doing forever. As in We’re completely together and we fuck around sometimes, what’s the big deal.

Which leads me to another paradox I’m in. I’m poly mostly because I believe in everyone’s right to be free with their bodies. I don’t think women in cis het relationships (or any relationships but this is where I’ve seen it most) should feel like they’re going to be murdered (just ask a straight married woman what would happen if her husband found out she cheated) for stepping out.

Everyone should be allowed to have sex with who they want to if it’s honest and agreed upon. I’m an anarchist feminist in this way like one of my favorite people in the world Mona Eltahawy.

And/but I also don’t believe in hierarchical relationships because I think they are inherently unfair, like why should one person be first and the most important and everyone else second or third and less important. That feels wrong to me, though this is such a long standing debate in poly worlds I’m loathe to even type it.

So, if I ever have the energy to date again, I will probably try to be monogamous.

You know when you’re such a radical, you become almost normal? Pillow it.

Which leads me back to my old therapist Josh, who was honestly the hottest person I’ve ever dated, I mean been in therapy with, who once said to me, “I think for you to have most of your emotional needs met, it should probably be through monogamy.”

At the time I thought he was so wrong and the stupidest, did I say hottest, therapist I’d ever had, and why couldn’t we just accidentally meet up at a bar one night and have our therapy sessions there?

But/and in my experience of deep codependency, which I learned from my very traumatized parents and everyone around me growing up, monogamy is very hard too.

I GUESS ALL OF THE THINGS ARE HARD, EXCEPT WHEN THEY’RE NOT.

Photo by stefan moertl on Unsplash

It’s also taken me so long to learn how to basically love myself and be on my own and I quite like being single and living my life the way I want. I like my own company too, but I do usually miss touch and sex.

Back to Mario, my only remaining two beefs are I wish to have not been broken up with over the phone, and I wish I would have had a chance to work on or even talk about what was going on for him before he decided to split.

For myself, I wish I could have been less grouchy in my texts and more trusting in my time with him. But/and I was kind of right not to trust him. Also, every one has the right to leave when they want to leave, and we don’t always handle everything in the most ideal ways, and if he were writing part of a substack about me, he would likely have his own beefs and they would be valid.

There’s also this whole manifesting issue which I loathe because it tells broken people that you get what you got because you’re too messed up to manifest a good thing. It also shuts out all systematic and structural problems that are making it so hard for a lot of us to be in loving and satisfying relationships.

The morning that Mario broke up with me was so shocking, like we’d literally never spoken of such a possibility, and we’d been having so much fun together and there was the I love you stuff. So I had the worst thoughts, which I’m not going to name but if you know you know.

I’ve done enough therapy to recognize the patterns, so I texted my friends, the most amazing support network and queer fam I’ve built for myself and they helped me through it. Because I knew I couldn’t be alone, and I so I went to Jason and Elke’s and Amy, Lex, and Megan texted me all day long. Jason and Elke wrapped me in blankets, fed me, hugged me, let me sob, and we watched TaskMaster which is a pick me up like no other, because it’s British, mean, funny, and has a just the right amount of BDSM energy.

I miss Mario. He brought a lot of joy into my life, and I’m sad that he didn’t feel he could communicate with me before he decided to end things. I miss that he checked on me a lot, and had so much candy in his apartment that I called him the Hansel and Gretal Witch. I miss going over to his apartment and getting high and having great sex and watching stupid TV. I miss laughing with him and the way he teased me, and I teased him.

I also don’t miss the feeling that maybe I’ll always have in romantic relationships, that the other shoe is going to drop. I don’t miss feeling confused about how many partners he had (not because it was wrong for him to have the partners he had, but because I just wanted to know because it made me feel more secure). I don’t miss the feelings I sometimes I had that if we weren’t stoned we might not have enough to talk about. I don’t miss feeling a little sad that he never read a thing I wrote or seemed to care about me as an intellectual. I don’t miss feeling like if I upset him too much he would leave.

Thankfully, I have a new therapist I really like and she looks like Emma Roberts who my daughter and I adore from Scream Queens and American Horror Story. Also, her level of care is different than what I’ve experienced before and we’re going to do EMDR, which I think will be good for me. Her name is Sarah, and I’ve never met a bad Sarah. Last week, when I was freaking out about a medical form, she said, “Don’t worry. We’ll figure it out together,” which are magic words to any stressed out person.

4

I’m feeling happy today and I’ve learned to enjoy these happy days or happy hours. I wrote an honest thing. You’re almost done reading it. Thank you for reading this far if you made it. I’m sending you 100 hundred puffy stickers through the imaginary mail system in my head.

My union won a historic strike and we changed the lives of almost 1000 people for the better. We stood up to one of the most powerful university corporations in the country and we won, and we did it through organizing that has changed the way I think about the world. I’m on the radio with Gwendolyn Alker (yes that one from the beginning) talking about our strike and what it means for academic freedom and universities everywhere. We come in at about minute 32.

I have new union friends! I have new ideas about what I want to write about next!

My kid and I watched several excellent new girl pop videos this morning. I have decided not to go to Manhattan today, and I get to meet some friends for a frozen outdoor drink later. While there, I will likely smoke a small amount of a joint which will lessen my pain and we all need less pain don’t we? The season finale of Drag Race is tonight, and I’m hoping for Darlene to win, but I love all three queens, so any winner will be great.

In a strange reversal of fortune, my cats have switched their dom/sub roles, and that makes me laugh several times a day because even they seem confused about it.

Last night I was lucky enough to see brilliant art, and I’m convinced more than ever that A.I. must be stopped, unions and person-to-person organizing are the way to make change, and when we fight, we win!

Next up, I promise to write about the strike. That was the plan this morning when I started this post, but I let the writing be what it wanted to be.

Enjoy the typos!

xoxo

Carley