newly sober: inhospitable environment
guest writer Stephanie Woods on the body, sex, and feminine rage
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in whatever way you support, just reading these words means the freakin’ world. thank you for being here <3
this week, we have been granted the privilege of reading words from my dear friend Stephanie Woods. the first time i heard her speak in a meeting, i could feel that she favors precision. she raised her hand and said, “Every time I tell my story, I discover what is true,” and i have been thinking about it ever since.
Stephanie is a writer/performer based in NYC, and i had the good fortune of watching her perform with the NYC Queer Circus this last summer. you can find her on instagram @stephintomyofficebaby and she is currently working on a show called Breathing Lessons for People Who Hate Being Told How to Breathe
My body is an inhospitable environment for men.
Funnily enough, this has little to nothing to do with my STD and it has everything to do with how I overextended my body and my heart for the previous decade and a half. I was dragging myself from relationship to relationship.
What does it mean to waste time doing or not doing something for that long? What does it mean to finally learn lessons in that last 9 months that I thought I was learning but wasn’t for 15 years prior?
The lessons of my body tell the story of sexual trauma: I consented for fear of not being desired. I am finally allowing myself to not be physically intimate with someone else; I am learning that I was very rarely consensually all that physically intimate with anyone.
My body is filled with anger.
There were times when I knew this about myself and I tried to speak up about it. I remember some of those times. The time I was with Jacob and I got brave enough to ask for what I wanted and for years after that he would make fun of me for asking him to put his fingers in my butt. The time I knew that Sam and I were in a rut and I went to a sexual counselor by myself. How she gave me an assignment to ask for a non-sexual massage, as a way of practicing receiving without the need to validate. How Sam rolled his eyes at me. How I felt heavy-handed, too much and simultaneously not enough.
I am filled with anger. This anger is what makes my body an inhospitable environment for men. I have been poked and slapped and forced to validate someone else’s good time by faking mine.
Faking an orgasm is only one way of doing it. I chose other methods that felt less dishonest but dishonest all the same. My dishonesty was in how I changed my breathing to fake excitement, in acting like I enjoyed the sight of a penis, in the way I didn’t speak up about how much blowjobs hurt my jaw or about how much I wanted someone to just know me and what I wanted. My dishonesty was in not saying how much I wanted intensity every time
.
How I don’t want constant, normal sex but either to be thrown around or looked in the eyeballs. How I want to be looked at like either you are going to eat me, kill me or marry me. How much I hate having to be simultaneously desirable and sexy and also boring enough to enjoy decent, everyday sex. How at this point, I find penises to be abrasive and terrifying. How I want to like them because, as much as I prefer sex with women for that reason, I want to enjoy sex with men because I am still emotionally attracted to them. How I would rather have great sex every once in awhile than good sex everyday. How I don’t want to have sex everyday and how much I resent both other men and myself for thinking I am supposed to act like I want everyday sex.
My body is not available.
For the years I was jumping from relationship to relationship or having slutty seasons in between, I was not availing my body to myself. I was, however, doing a lot of body work. That, and the fact that I am, at my core, a sensitive person, made me think I had all the body awareness I would ever need, that I was the icon of physical awareness. I was not. I am not
As a side and not so side note: I was an active alcoholic for all of these years. As alcoholics, our stories are multifaceted. While I did some good creative and emotional work in my drinking years, some things like real honesty and physical healing were never going to be fully available to me without sobriety. While I was participating in physical training in my performance studies and while I was going to therapy, I was drinking to the point of blacking out most days. To value the act of opening and self-expression while actively trying to shut it down is like putting out a fire with one hand and lighting a match with another. It makes for busy work that never really grows on itself or, if it does, can only go so far.
Many alcoholics, save maybe those who got sober really young, have a common experience of having somewhat of an arrested development. For me, this came in the way of doing a lot of self work that I was never fully able to incorporate into myself. In the 9 months I have now been sober, I am learning more about my anger and resentments as well as my tendencies and desires. I want more than I have ever wanted and yet have more patience than I have ever had in order to wait for what I actually want.
Sharing my body with people I didn’t want or who I knew didn’t care for me was a big part of my story as an alcoholic. It’s a big part of my story as a woman, as a person. I have been learning a lesson for years that finally took sobriety for me to put to action. Being sober is not my everything but it is my job to protect it. I protect it by protecting my heart, by showing up for my body and my desires or lack thereof. I protect it by acknowledging that this body is not available to anyone but me right now.
thank you for reading newly sober. we are approaching my one year anniversary and it is weird and exciting and exhausting and exhilarating. i can’t believe where i was a year ago today— i can’t believe i was three days sober on Christmas last year.
i am so thankful, to hit a milestone and to share it with you.
as always, i am thankful that you are here. please take the time to like, comment, share, and subscribe. your feedback helps more than you realize— both in honing this newsletter and boosting morale.
I LOVE U!
xoxoxo,
PAULINA
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