rebornsomeday - Tumblr blog

[rebornsomeday]

I’m not white. I do live in Europe, though. This doesn’t make me unique; there are many like me. It doesn’t make me unique, but it does pose special problems. When you’re not white, but you live in a majority white part of the world, you have to grapple with many different, difficult things. Today, I want to talk specifically about romance and sexuality.

I don’t think I’m unattractive a person. I think my features are fairly angular in a way that’s becoming of a man, and my dark skin is quite smooth and even. I’m not perfect, though. I’m an inch or so shorter than the average height in my country, and I’m naturally skinny. I’m on the short side, but I’m definitely not short enough that it’s notable. I’m about 5′8, or just a little under. That’s not that short. I’m skinny, but I know this isn’t disqualifying in terms of attraction. Lots of girls are into skinny, artsy boys.

However, I often find myself in sexual and romantic droughts. One of the problems is I’ve grown up in Europe and have internalised European beauty standards. I hate this about myself, but it’s true. I tend towards lighter skinned girls with hair that ranges between European curly and straight. This doesn’t actually exclude many people. European beauty standards overlap with many parts of the world. Many Asians from every part of Asia have lighter skin, the right hair texture, and straight noses. It mostly excludes my people: Africans. Naturally dark skinned, nappy hair (full of kinks and the tightest curls), and broader noses. Nothing is unattractive about these features in themselves and I can easily recognise attractive people of African descent. But my beauty standards are tainted, and I don't find myself personally attracted to my own people.

And there’s the rub. The very beauty standards I have inherited mean the people who I’m drawn to are not drawn to me. It would be hypocritical of me to complain, but it’s still painful. I wish I could flip a switch and have new beauty standards, but they’re quite deeply ingrained. Ultimately, I think it’s racist to have race-related beauty standards. It falls under the unusual category of ‘impersonal racism’, though. It’s racism that seeps into you through the culture and is hard to shake off. It’s a unique kind of racism that you can’t be held personally accountable for. It’s just a sad result of your fucked up times. 

Nobody ever wants to talk about this topic, because it’s hard to talk about. Many innocent people are implicated as racist, and that’s scary to think about. But it’s just how it is. It makes finding sex and romance much harder for people like me. And my celibacy, my destitution in romance, is almost logically justified, in a hideous way.

Now, having said all that, it is also my personality. I don’t chase sex or romance as intentionally as I could. Doing so is both embarrassing and frightening. Perhaps ultimately my failures in sex and romance are much more of a personality issue than the culture’s internalised racism. It’s hard to say. I’m just inclined to lean towards the racism answer when so many demure, skinny, middlingly attractive white guys (i.e. me, but white) get laid and find relationships so easily. I could be bitter, but I don’t think so. There have been studies analysing online dating success that shows, in our culture, there’s a racist bias in the worlds of sex and romance. I don’t think I’m just bitter.

I just miss romance, and it’s impossible to see when or if it’ll ever come back to my life.

[rebornsomeday]

I haven’t had sex in about a year and a half. The sun has graced our island this weekend and spring is transitioning into summer. This means people are dressed for the occasion. Women are wearing light dresses, skirts, shorts, and open-fronted tops. Legs are on show, you can see underwear through the thin fabric of summer dresses, cleavage is exposed to keep cool. It’s unintentional, but incredibly sexual. I miss the sensation of flesh against flesh, unified warmth, scents that can only be experienced in intimacy. I miss losing myself in another and the feeling of being wanted, being accepted.

I have lost a lot of confidence over the past few years. My sexual and romantic confidence is especially low. I’m not afraid of women, but I’m terrified of intimacy. Terrified. I think I know why, but I don’t really want to go into it in too much detail. To make a long story short, I had a bad experience with a girl and I lost friends over it, and it’s clear that I have some trauma related to intimacy now -- dramatic as that sounds. I don’t know how to fix myself. Recently I reconnected with a girl I had a crush on some years back, and the meeting didn’t go very smoothly. I was scared, nervous, and awkward. She was kind and very accommodating, but even just typing this out and recalling myself talking to her makes me sick with embarrassment and shame. When I was younger I used to joke about dying alone, because I was a teenager and it was hard to talk to girls. Now I’m in my mid-20s and I’ve had some experience, and it’s gone poorly, and I’m leaden with emotional baggage that makes it very hard for me to connect with others. Now I’m genuinely afraid of dying alone. So, yeah, I miss sex. Which I think is a proxy for: I miss intimacy. I miss being able to love and being loved. I don’t want to be scared. I don’t want to be alone. I just want to feel confident. I just want to feel comfortable with the body I have been dealt; I just want to feel accepted. Not politely accepted in the way everybody has to accept everyone else for a smooth-running society; I want to feel intimately accepted. I want to feel that I’m loveable. So yeah, I miss sex.

[rebornsomeday]

I miss having a girlfriend. Someone who almost always want to hang out with you more than other people; someone who forms the core of your support network. Someone you can wake up next to; someone who you can take walks with without worry; someone who will do the strange, bizarre, and experimental with you, and no judgement needs to be feared.

I had all this with someone, for about a year, and I let it go. Now I’m struggling to find it with anybody else. I don’t know if I ever will. I can only hope.

[rebornsomeday]

I feel a pain whose aetiology I’m not one hundred percent certain about. It’s a deep-belly, emotional pain, and it’s hard to pick out its origin clues within my internal mess. I think it has to do with the fact that I find it so difficult to maintain and cultivate interpersonal relationships. When I fail to do this, when I let messages go unanswered because I don’t know what to say, or because I’m nervous about saying the wrong thing, it ignites the engine of self-doubt, and the anxiety-machinery starts chugging. I feel alone; I begin to isolate myself; I lose the vision of my own self-worth. A wretched cycle is born. It would seem like the escape from this cycle is quite simple: reach out to people -- but it’s harder than that. When you’re in the pits of the cycle, when you’re already doubting yourself and avoiding messages, it’s hard to just message someone. You’re certain you’re going to flub your lines; you’re going to prove less intriguing or interesting to the person who has reached out to you in the first place. You’re just not going to be good enough.

I don’t know how to get over this. It comes and it goes, but when it is here, it’s ghastly, unignorable, super-present. I suppose the answer does ultimately lie in getting over the worry that I will be perceived as unworthy of one’s time once I put myself out there and make myself vulnerable. I need to somehow convince myself that people are less judgemental and dismissive than I believe they are. And therein lies the problem really. People really do seem that way. They judge and they dismiss; they judge and they dismiss; it’s what they do and it’s terrifying.

Honestly, god knows what I’m supposed to do. I suppose one way to interpret this is that perhaps the real issue here is I don’t find myself very interesting, so I end up projecting my own belief-set into the minds of others. The answer then would be to become more interesting on my own terms: do more things that I personally would find interesting and would be able to talk about. This feels ink I’ve hit upon something. Start from myself and build outwards. If I find myself undeniably interesting, then so what of the judgement of others? After I find myself interesting, it simply becomes a match-up game: do other people share the same interests as me? Failing to find myself interesting results in self-doubt which results in the isolation which results in the vicious cycle.

I need to develop an ability to talk about my interests on my own terms and this might solve the problem of self-doubt.

[rebornsomeday]

I think I’m crushing on my friend’s girlfriend of 3 years. I’m sure nothing unfortunate will happen. She really loves him and he seems significantly invested in her. Nothing is going to change. I need to calm down. 

The one other girl that lives in this city, who I have a crush on, came to the pub last week with a guy that touched her a tad too intimately.

Everyone I’m interested in has boyfriends. I don’t think it’s likely that I’m gonna meet anybody this master’s year, nothing that will work out anyway. Yesterday I met with a girl that I knew from my undergraduate. It’s not clear whether it was a date or whether we were just hanging out. She seemed dressed and made up for the occasion, and there were only two of us, so I think, from the outside, it probably looked like a date. I suppose we’ll call it that. We hit it off, but I’m not so sure if there was anything there more than a friendship connection. There was sometimes a friction in the flow of connection -- with some people, there’s just a constant flowing connection and you quickly feel comfortable with them, but there was slight, occasional friction in ours. It’s not as binary as “feeling a click” or not feeling one. I’d put it more in percentage terms: we had a 70% flow, but I’m not sure if that warrants pursuing this. Furthermore, she’s attractive but I don’t know whether I’m attracted to her. I probably could be, with more emotional connection -- but again, I’m not sure if that will come.

Something tells me that, even if we don’t develop something more romantic, we could probably hang out a couple more times and be happy to sleep with each other. I don’t actually know if that’s what I want, though. I’ll have to FB stalk her a little more and think about if there’s anything here.

It’s a shame the two girls I’m really into already have love interests.

This love game is hard.

[rebornsomeday]

I got to the end of this and thought, “H-how...how am I suppose to just read this and walk away?” This was revelatory. It was like stumbling upon my own personal religious text. I need this memorised. I need this printed. I need this framed. Fuck.

The Chase is the Thing and the Thing is the Chase

For Chris: I’ve always really wanted to get into acting and/or comedy but I’m terrified of failing at it. How do you get the courage to perform?

- Anonymous

[rebornsomeday]

I feel like if I got over this one, phenomenal, excruciating flaw of caring excessively about what people think of me and any peripheral things having to do with me, I’d untap some kind of social super power within myself.

[rebornsomeday]

Jealousy

Jealousy burns preternatural.

I broke up with a girl I loved some months ago, because I wasn’t sure if she was the “final” one for me, whether there wasn’t somebody else out there that I could love with a more burning passion. Now, with an almost karmic irony, she has found another lover before me, and I’m crippled by a sense of loneliness and despair. I never stopped loving her, but she forced herself to stop loving me when we broke up. She needed to ‘move on’. I never did move on, even though I instigated this; it’s my fault.

Suddenly I find myself forced to move on. She is seeing another guy. They are probably sexual together already. I know this because she has suggested as much to me directly. It kills me to think about. It’s a petty jealousy, but I hate that some guy she’s known for a little while is making love to her, and now she wants nothing to do with me romantically, and I have nothing. It’s petty; it’s envious; it’s unattractive. I can’t help it. I am those things right now.

We thought we could still be friends while going through this transition, of her with a new guy and me alone and having failed to move on, but it’s too painful. I had a minor panic episode a couple days ago just thinking about it all. It’s ridiculous, but it’s true. She is one of my closest friends, but I can’t put myself through this while I’m still pining for her and while I’m full of regrets. I’ve suggested a period of distancing between us for a while, just so I can hopefully gather myself, be less of a jealous child, and perhaps come back ready to be “just friends” (that vicious phrase) and happy for her new thing. At the moment, I’m not in that space. I’m not ready.

My body aches and there are dull pains everywhere in my torso. I have felt this before and I have survived, but it’s never pleasant. It’s an involuntary, self-inflicted torture. My body and mind are not mine in cases like these, and I am corporally punished for thoughts I can’t control.

All this because I failed to put the right valuation on what I had with this girl. But I don’t know -- maybe I am exaggerating what we had because I’m scared and fear loneliness. Maybe there is someone better for me out there; maybe I was right. Maybe this is the price to pay for a future, unthinkable happiness. I don’t know. I’m no clairvoyant, alas.

All I know is that right now I’m alone and in pain and in a headspace that is not conducive to working well on my masters programme. And yet, the work must be done. So onwards, as ever. Onwards.

[rebornsomeday]

A few thoughts III:

It’s 3.20 pm on a Saturday and I’ve avoided a masterclass on epistemology and have done nothing productive in its stead. Anxiety is a constant feature of my life these days, as expressed by this series -- and yet, I never judge that it’s enough to go see a doctor; it’s just a personal and permanent struggle. I can tell a part of me wants to, but I also want to hopefully succeed in life without gambling with my neurochemistry. I don’t know.

Loneliness comes and goes, but I no longer feel trapped. If I feel lonely, I usually understand that it’s my own fault, that I’m not cultivating relationships correctly. It’s hard for me. My nature either tends towards solitude or, if not that, towards desiring a strong connection with just one other person. I’m not concerned with having a wide group of friends or being close to a various amount of people. I have trouble securing the right “one” though. The problem is partially I have difficulty opening up (after past hurts and past mistakes), but part of it is difficulty genuinely finding the right sort of person. I used to believe I could fall in love with most people, but these days I find that to be less true. Perhaps I’ve become less open-minded than in my optimistic 18-year-old days; perhaps becoming jaded is a natural result of emotional scarring. I never wanted to be a jaded person, but I can sense it stirring in myself. I will fight it, but I can sense it. I sometimes wonder whether the girls I have loved most voraciously in my past, I would love as voraciously today. Sometimes I doubt it. I hope I don’t ‘jade’ myself into permanent solitude.

Clearly I’m still not content. I will be content when I am productive and know proximate love and earn a little money. I do none of those things at present.

I left the relationship I referred to in the reprise. I sometimes wonder whether it was a mistake or whether I merely miss sex, company, and support. To appreciate a relationship, you probably ought to appreciate the sex, company, and support of your significant other in particular, and not just appreciate them (your SO) as an instrument for bringing you those things. Otherwise you won’t feel loyalty or deep love. But I find it more and more difficult to encounter people for whom I feel deep love. I suppose deep love and loyalty are things that develop in a relationship over time. I want deep love, but I would equally be content just with sex, company, and support. But, as mentioned in the point before last, I would prefer these things wrapped up in one person rather than multiple people. So I’m stuck in a predicament wherein: either I find one person to love deeply, or I find one person who can instrumentally provide sex, company, and support. Is the latter desire hollow? Perhaps. But everybody has their weaknesses. I would be happier deeply loving somebody, though. Peopling is hard. I just want to marry and have a family and occasionally travel and write things. I no longer have any real desire to deal directly and intimately with society at large lol. Have I become old?

I have decided I do want to go into academia. Following the last two instalments of this series, one might think I had been mentally backed into this conclusion. And perhaps I was. But I also think I developed towards it, and had a predisposition towards it too. It’s difficult to say with full certainty. In any case, I want to do a PhD. In fact, I would like to do it in the US -- but Trump has happened, and I’m a minority. Also god knows if I would be accepted anywhere with funding. I need to succeed at this masters first.

A  few thoughts:

it’s 6 am and I’m unable to sleep – in part due to Redbull, in part due to fear-of-inadequacy-related stress

I haven’t felt lonely in a long time

I’m still not content

I want the fire of love, not just the pale light of casual friendship (I am aware that that is potentially unhealthy, but I insist I don’t feel it to an unhealthy extent)

I want a break from academia, but I kind of can’t afford one, not with recent performances

[rebornsomeday]

[rebornsomeday]

A great sentiment.

I’m no longer on bad terms w/ anyone. I’m declaring it. Dislike me by yourself. I wish you the best.

[rebornsomeday]

A few thoughts, a reprise:

 It’s 3.23 pm and I’ve skipped a class due to anxiety. I’m worried that my anxiety is growing worse, but I don’t think it’s bad enough to seek help yet, but I also don’t know how bad it has to get before it’s time to.

I still don’t feel lonely; I feel trapped.

I’m still not content.

I am in a relationship that by all standards is a good one, but I want something else -- I never did capture the “fire of love” that I sought.

I don’t know where else to go but academia.

A  few thoughts:

it’s 6 am and I’m unable to sleep – in part due to Redbull, in part due to fear-of-inadequacy-related stress

I haven’t felt lonely in a long time

I’m still not content

I want the fire of love, not just the pale light of casual friendship (I am aware that that is potentially unhealthy, but I insist I don’t feel it to an unhealthy extent)

I want a break from academia, but I kind of can’t afford one, not with recent performances

[rebornsomeday]

I’m fairly sure that in this day and age you can type any quotidian piece of prose, space it like verse, and get lauded as an internet poet.

[rebornsomeday]

[rebornsomeday]

it’s not boring to love anything. the only thoroughly tedious thing is this kind of undercutting, supercilious attitude

in a scale from 1 to “i love the beatles” how boring are you?

[rebornsomeday]

it's good and imperative that you drink enough to feel uninhibited, to speak too confidently about things on which you are uncertain,  and to do the things you may regret.

it's bad and ill-advised to regret or feel embarrassed about those things for months or years afterwards, but i have yet to solve that part of the equation.

[rebornsomeday]

it was cold that autumn night, but they had the outdoor heating on, so it was warm enough to feel blanketed by a sense of false security. it was that night that you broke the news, and the way you did it--slow, impending, obvious, quiet--the way you did it, god himself wouldn't have known how to respond. since then, it's safe to say we agree at least upon one thing, namely: the doctrine of revolving doors - that, in one's life, people roll in and out, through the revolving doors, perpetually, unstoppably, and it is your emotional imperative to accept that.