Choosing the Discernment of Verisimilitude Over Nescience By Way of Preferences

They weren’t a bad lay, but we were quite mismatched in terms of a lasting relationship. We were fucking one night a month or so into discovering this about each other and then, rather swiftly, though my body remained in the act, deliciously underneath them, I felt the non-physical parts of me jam and halt. We were naked and tangled and I froze. Some part of me would’ve preferred to hit the override button, zamboni over the bump or divet, and keep going. You see, their long limbs and thick torso deliciously swallowed my own frame. But other parts of me wouldn’t allow it, demanding my slowed down presence instead.

I couldn’t speak for several minutes and laid under them stiff and silent like a wide-eyed corpse. No specific memory was attached to the emotional flashback but my body knew because our bodies know everything. Our bodies are untrickable, bound as they are to the truth that is the present moment.

They slowly pulled their fingers out of me and looked into my eyes.

“Hey, where’d you go? Are you okay?”

Getting words out was like trying to talk under water but eventually I explained with some clumsy tears and fragmented sentences, and then requested that they stayed entwined with me, which they did. After maybe 15 minutes the freeze thawed and the invisible parts of me caught back up with my body once again.

We may have been mismatched but their willingness to hold me as my nervous system processed in time with another human was sweet and healing.

Learning to be the subjects of our own lives in a rape culture where at least half the population has been groomed as objects for someone else’s subjecting is no weak-hearted whim, but an act of inner and outer excellence. The recentering of our preferences and needs in this rapey soup, and then holding fast to them while remaining mutable, adventurous, and loving takes courage and a willingness to be with the discomfort of a self becoming.

I heard Tyson Yunkaporta say in an interview once that trauma is created by the inability or failure to make meaning of our experiences. So I wonder, if we were able to harvest true meaning out of our past and present, would that create the alignment needed for us to move through these times without generating further trauma for ourselves and others? And would we then be able to be the present-momenters needed to make the arc beyond rape culture?

I may not ever know why I froze and thawed that night. And it’s not that I don’t care why, but the why doesn’t entirely feel like the point, or even the most interesting part of the story to me aside from the naming that I do indeed exist in a rape culture.

I’ve been sloughing off the grooming for years now. And I’m still discerning who I need to become in order to stop bending and contorting myself to others. To cease falling for their lies and my own about what’s possible, and to unapologetically lap up my life for my own authentic self and soul to get what I need to be able to look back at the end and say, “yeah, baby!” And to know deep in these Earth-borrowed bones, that I did what I came here to do to the best of my ability. To claim the truth that I have a right to be here and take up space, and to hold fast and softly that I will come the way I want to, and that my job isn’t judging how I want to come or who I want to do it with, but the discernment and accountability of following through. To recognize the traction of desire that allows something like a preference or need to float up into manifestation. And in all of this meaning making, what undomestication away from rape culture is required to become my most whole-hearted self? Dear reader, I’m not calling from on high having figured this out, but am rather sitting in the circle alongside you, discovering and curious.

I suspect that alignment to self and each other and holding ourselves through these experiences are some of the missing links to not just surviving this current timeline but flourishing. To reconciling the past without drowning from the cruelty and inhumanity of daily life in a rape culture.

My preferences have coalesced one step at a time and sometimes half a step. And years later, I can finally summarize:

“I want you to hold me. Wait, I want you to hit me while you’re fucking me. Actually, I want you to hit me and then fuck me, but not both at the same time.” or “Honestly, tonight will you just play with my hair?”

I prefer intensity, luxuriating in a given sexual act, and a dive into passionate irascible darkness. I prefer tenderness of heart and being cherished without preciousness or fawning. I prefer going hard, deep, and to the tempo of the moment with myself or a lover. And I prefer the tilted and whimsical side of order and a deep cackle, the kind that makes us pee, or choke a little on spit, at this thing we’re doing called human life.

It is my preference that on this current timeline, a tipping-point-number of us be able to live our discernments and desires fully enough to tell our stories whilst weaving new ones, without crumbling under the inhumanity or mutilation of those swinging their clubs of broken hearts, broken minds, and broken passions. My preference is that we collectively cease being derailed when we witness the ragged club swinging or label it as anything more than impotence and broken heartedness. That we compassionately intend that these club swingers get what they need to begin their healing journey, hold space for them, as we would a wounded bird, for the duration of their healing process, but that we wholly grasp that just because they are loud and bombastic does not mean they get to keep coopting our theater’s sweet neighborhood production.

The curtain opens on this timeline perhaps with survival of the bombasity, but the show becomes truly delightful as the characters discover themselves wild adults in the wilderness of the manifest world. Not “adulting” – not children playing house – but Sacred Adults, with power to wield in the Dreaming of how things might be. Delight, when our hearts crack open and the beat drops, revealing to our human senses the exquisite rhythm of Nature shuddering through our bodies as it does the terrain in an autumnal storm. When we realize ourselves as one and the same with the morning droplets landing through the air onto a single floating yellowed Alder leaf. Oh my god, to fall on a leaf falling through air. And then to seep dramatically into the bottom of the verdant ravine itself. Where we realize our agency to come enough times that our everyday senses recognize the gusts as but one and the same as that lush pinch on our thigh. Our humanity is Nature, and we have discarded all other falsities. Our fingertips, the falling raindrops, and our agency are but one and the same gentle raw moan. And we are singing the story of consorting with seasons, and may report back after all this lifing, that it was but exquisite to consort with a season. Exquisite to snort time with the rest of creation snorting time. To glorify pleasure and align with chaos becoming order becoming chaos becoming – oh my god – order once again. And that all of this settles inside, as we name and then live our experience of the divine, ourselves main characters, pushing the line as the consorts of seasons and changing tides.

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