9. We need to connect all of the incredibly awesome, talented, beautiful sexual beings in the city so we can build a community of support and friendship and sexy times.
10. Bewbs.
11. Khadeja Wilkinson is offering FREE KISSES.
12. The Condom Shack is being fucking amazing and giving us a $70 gift basket that we are raffling off!
Shame, guilt and embarrassment are still things I too often associate when it comes to periods. As opposed to many other obstacles I have overcome in regards to my sexual self, there are little to no public displays of ‘okay periods’. In elementary school, a bloody pad had been left in the middle of the floor in the girls bathroom. Despite the possible hygienic issues that come to mind, there was much too much negative gossip occurring between girls, mostly “Ew”.
In Grade 7, I blatantly lied to all of my girlfriends when they asked the group if anyone had gotten their periods. For the first year, I had no clue how to deal with it, and failed miserably at hiding the damage (bloody sheets, underwear, towels…)
There is an episode of Degrassi Jr. High (a show I used to watch nearly religiously when I was 12) in which Emma gets her first period while she was wearing a white skirt (of course). She has no option but to switch into her gym shorts, and when her class makes fun of her fashion choice, she unblinkingly lectures them about how she has just gotten her period, and basically to fuck off. (Which you can watch here at 15:45… if you are curious). As a fellow 12-year-old lying to her friends about her menstrual cycle… I was mortified that Emma would do such a thing… And completely 100% in awe of her. Yeah, it’s a TV show, but Emma’s frank, go-screw-yourself ‘tude was something that would intrinsically alter my self-esteem.
Today, I read this by one of the women from Betty Dodson’s Bodysex Workshop, and again, was in awe.
Public talking about menses makes people squeamish, so I love doing it. Public images of bleeding just DON’T happen right? Except they do. Once I was bleeding and carrying two suitcases and a small child and my tampon leaked and ran down my legs whilst I was on a public bus. The driver and my fellow passengers looked truly agonised both for themselves and for me. So I flashed them a smile and a shrug and said… “what can you do? it happens”. I remember right up until it was pouring down my legs I was mortified and begging divine forces of the female persuasion to stop it from happening… afterwards I just thought…”fuck it”. Why was I so scared of it anyway? men urinate in public spaces without batting an eyelid. The trickles of blood down my legs also seemed strangely beautiful and cathartic. Acceptance is peaceful and eventually people stopped staring at me and went back to their business.
Personally I love a woman’s blood. I love fucking a woman when she is bleeding, not all women are horny at this time, or comfortable with their own blood, but when they are…phew…it’s intense. I love having the blood on my hands and on my sheets and I get off on the murder scene-esque visual of the sex. I have always wondered why men find it so very very abhorent. Is it a biblical legacy from judaism claiming that women are unclean and unholy whilst they bleed? Is it misogyny? Gynophobia? Can the fellas out there tell me what about it especially bothers you? It’s life giving just like sperm and we know the boys love cum shots… so what is it about this excretion that makes you say ew?
And then there’s the issue of periods and sexy time. That fearful choking sensation I had when I had to tell my first boyfriend there was a string in the place he wanted to be fiddling around in. It’s still an uncomfortable conversation I try to avoid having… I often use phrases that completely remove me from the situation: Biology has struck! Mother nature has come beckoning! Physical hinderances have bore down on my vagina! Very rarely do I flat out say: I have my period.
(Oh hey Future Caitlin. Remember this? When you had hang ups about portions of your body you have absolutely no control over? Yeah. This is you in 2012. I hope you and your menses are tight like nuns now…Lawlz…)
Laci Green sums things up nicely here:
It is an ever exciting and uplifting experience the first time you meet a guy who doesn’t care about which portion of your cycle you are on and remains just as enthused to get up in there. Let’s be serious. Chick’s bodies are these incredible organic and natural baby making machines. SERIOUSLY. Think about it. It’s pretty fucking ridiculous and crazy. If our bodies need to shed our uterine lining in order for this to happen, then cool, so be it. With every drop of blood should come forth the thought: She can grow a life form in her womb. I am mesmerized.
One time I went on a date with a man who was 41 years old. I was 20. I’d had an all-encompassing desire to fulfill my fantasy of being ‘had’ by an ‘older man’. So, amongst the pages upon pages of available people in Toronto on OKCupid I found a pepper-haired, barrel chested man who vaguely resembled George Clooney.
oh hai
We had a few interesting and exciting experiences together… And than this happened (sidenote, when I write journal entries, I write in third person… Don’t ask):
She watches him undress in her room with a low ceiling and pink floral bedspread. She is sober and the contrast is heavy: she can see age on him, and it is highlighted by the intense youth of her bedroom.
She has had a lot of boys and men in this room. She has seen a lot of nudity between these walls and within those sheets. But there is something stark and blunt about the nudity her older man is unknowingly show-casing to her as he prepares himself for sleep.
A vulnerable kind of nakedness that people are usually reluctant to show, or otherwise too worn out to care about showing at the end of the night, when there is no sex or play involved, but just one tired body disrobing it’s tired self.
“Can I cuddle you?” He asks, scooting into the middle of the bed.
She wants to say no, “Of course.”
This interaction with him was never supposed to be this intimate. She listens to him snore for half an hour before she escapes and goes to sleep on her couch. Lying side-by-side with him allowed her to discover just how wide the distance between their ages was- she was struck and a little taken aback by the dysfunction of the body when age hits.
There’s a nice thing about youth- things like snoring, and stumbling when you remove your pants are seen as cute and quirky. But what she hadn’t expected was how differently these quirks look on someone 20 years her senior. Just as, perhaps, he may have expected her to always look desirable, she had engrained the expectation that he always be debonair.
The gap between them, the generation between them, hit her quickly and swiftly.
Two months later, after calling it quits, a good friend of mine receives a message in her dating inbox along the lines of: Remember me? I was one of Caitlin’s experiments.
Now, as someone who throws party’s to celebrate naked bodies, it is important for me to mention the difference between being happy and supportive of someone’s relationship with their body, and being aroused by that person’s body.
“The sex therapist Margaret Nichols observes that though your partner may still love you if you gain fifty pounds and shuffle around the house in bunny slippers and a stained T-shirt, he probably won’t get hard for you (and she won’t get wet).”
- Esther Perel, “Mating in Captivity”
Arousal is often co-existing beside objectivity (to balance that statement: humans ARE complex and intriguing creatures and often times it will be a truck ton more than just objectivity that comes along with arousal). I am not physically attracted to everyone I find to be an awesome person, and this is okay and a handy tool in your future endeavors within relations. You’re ability to say ‘No Thank You’ is your guiding light.
But, dear 40-something silver fox, I would like to thank you for the experiences you gave me, and perhaps remind you that dating in and of itself is just one large science project.
At some point around the same time I had decided I wanted to be a canister of sexual power and deviance, I had agreed to go visit a male I had very few face-to-face interactions with but who had given my heart much comfort. This happened (Preparation, I’m about to get a little dark and heavy and slightly vulnerable… If I have learned anything within this sexual growth process is that story-sharing is very likely the most important element to connecting with others – in a sexual manner or a hanging out with naked chicks manner. And lord knows, it is probably very likely that something similar has happened to you at some point in your life or that you can relate in some way… So, here it goes [also - reiteration for complete and utter respect and love for all people who I anonymously reference - it is unlikely this will happen, but if it does, know that I wish you all the best and I thank you for this experience]):
“I don’t want to just be another number” he assures her time and time again within every conversation they have.
She tells him he couldn’t be. That she cares about him as a person too much, that she values his concern for her well-being more than she could ever value a jockified high school acquaintance that slapped her ass one summer’s eve.
She tells him: “I just want hugs. Many hugs.”
“If I hug you, I’ll want to kiss you” He tells her.
In her mind a kiss is no big deal. She has kissed plenty of people. To kiss someone who cares about her would only enhance the kiss, she imagines.
“Okay”
“Okay then.”
She boards a train headed West to suburbia with a naive hope for a pg-rated evening she really needs.
He sits in his car waiting for her at the platform.
She is enthused to see him and gives him a hug and a warm smile across the interior of his car but can’t help but immediately noting how un-attracted she is to him: He has shaved off his beard and now looks pre-pubescent, making the heaviness of an overweight face more strikingly obvious. With nothing to hide behind, he is undeniably unappealing. He sparks similarities to Tweedle Dee (and Dum) in her image bank. But she overlooks this for the moment, because she knows how much he cares.
He takes her for sandwiches and they give each other updates on their lives. He speaks while he eats and she is having trouble divorcing her eyes from the food that gets stuck in his teeth even when he washes everything down with a super-sized coke.
Back at his house, she takes on the personality of an excited squirrel, darting in and out of roommate’s rooms, opening books, flipping over pillows, checking out pictures, drawers, movie titles, all while he is standing silently at the door of the room, waiting for her to settle, waiting for her to notice him. And she can feel him. She can feel that he wants her full attention, expecting it. And he wants it so badly it puts her on edge. This little shell of sexual dynamite is full of shakes and quakes of discomfort; a kind of shrapnel in her stomach.
“I need a beer.”
“I don’t want you to be drunk with me.” She swears at him in her head, thinking “Drunk is the only way I can be with you right now”. She opens the fridge and pulls out a bottle of Corona, opening it with her teeth.
She hops up onto the counter top and he stands too close to her.
“Are you attracted to me?” He asks her.
She side-steps the question to avoid being dishonest and to avoid hurting feelings, “You aren’t my type. But your personality makes you slightly more attractive to me, I guess.” It works. So well that she can tell he still wants to kiss her, and she has no where to escape to.
She is stuck in this house of his in the middle of suburban Hamilton, and it only has the potential to become even more awkward if she tells him “NO. I AM NOT ATTRACTED TO YOUR OVERWEIGHT, UNHEALTHY BODY YOU RAGING BALL OF PENT UP RELIGIOUS HORMONES.” But you make her feel safe. Correction: You MADE her feel safe.
“I feel like we need to kiss to break the ice.” “Why?” “Because this is awkward.” “IT’S ONLY AWKWARD BECAUSE YOU CAN’T TELL THAT I DON’T WANT TO FUCKING TOUCH YOU.” She screams inside her head.
She downs her beer and quickly goes for another. At this point she is purposely trying to give herself beer goggles. Maybe she won’t have to mind. Maybe she can enjoy this.
He sways her to sit on a couch with him and then tells her, “I’m going to kiss you now.”
She has no where to run to. His lips hit hers. The only logic she can form in her mind at this point is to close her eyes tight and turn into her sexual dynamite self, finish him off, and then hopefully repel him with ‘I’m too tired’ for the rest of the evening. After a few moments of tentatively allowing him to ram his tongue in her mouth, she saddles up, takes the reins and gets er done in a wee 10 minutes flat. But he decides he wants to do his duty, and his hand slides down the front of her shorts, in search for a clit that he will never find, and holes he will never enter. She pushes him away when she can take no more.
She lies topless on his couch with her beer in hand.
“Can you be normal, not topless you now?” As he zips up his pants.
She feels more used by this boy who tried so hard not to make her feel used than she ever has before by those who didn’t hide the fact that they were using her.
seems visually relative…
Now… There are a handful of things that, as a reader, could make you potentially uncomfortable whilst reading that story.
Deciding to be intimate with someone is an ever-evolving decision that can rapidly change from one moment to the next. I was quickly learning that although I considered myself to be a sexually liberated female in a contemporary society, I also didn’t know how NOT to be a sexually liberated female. I had not been told or taught the importance of being able to say ‘no’ or WHY it is important.
YOUR ABILITY TO SAY ‘NO,’ GIVES YOUR PARTNER THE ABILITY AND FREEDOM TO ASK FOR WHAT THEY WANT. And vice versa. You can read more about consent here.
To be content and calm to decline one’s invitation for intimacy. To be aware that you are not becoming an immoral, ugly person for not engaging in sexual activity because you are not attracted to that person, is okay. Better than okay. It’s honest.
So, yesterday I vaguely posted on Facebook about “Pure” – an eight week workshop I’m pioneering with Ness Fraser (another awesome, sex-positive, writer chicka). The full title of the workshop is “Pure: Reclaiming Sexual Education.” It is a program targeted towards 12-to-14-year-old girls that will approach topics like virginity, anatomy, body image, sexuality, arousal, etc. in the same open, honest and safe space as Body Pride. Ness and I hope to create the resource we only wished we had as young girls (you have no idea how often I scream in frustration to my ceiling during our Body Pride story sharing: “WHY DID NO ONE TELL ME THIS WHEN I WAS 12?!”)
We are incredibly stoked about Pure and we are putting forth all of our time and energy into making this happen. We have an eight-week, pre-planned curriculum, we have rules, we have ambitions, we have down-right excitement to become what we always needed as young girls.
We are advertising the program to parents, hoping they will recognize the benefits their daughters will receive from this kind of workshop. Upon first glance, parents may stop and think “No, no thank you, my daughter does not need more information about sex.” But where are girls currently getting their information from? Is this enough? Is what they are learning from the media and the school system going to be enough to inform them about enthusiastic consent and how to ask for what they want? Will it be enough to understand the virgin/whore dichotomy the media is still bombarding women with? Will it be enough to guarantee that they won’t have hang-ups, anxieties, guilt, shame or fear about their own bodies?
And so… we march forth, ready to hit the controversial wave-pool head-on and defend ourselves. We didn’t just put this together overnight. We have sat and talked frequently about the potential issues we may have, the debates that may arise. Here they are:
1. What’s in a name?
A) My blog is happily and blatantly entitled “To Be A Slut”. I have 1,000 printed business cards with my logo and name on them. I have a large, expanding readership that knows Caitlin K. Roberts as ‘To Be A Slut’.
We are advertising to parents and the reality of this is that there will likely be a great guttural instinct that they may not want someone who self-identifies as a ‘slut’ to be teaching their daughters about sexuality.
And why not?
Because we all have personal histories with words. Some words have heavier more daunting histories than other words, and in our society, ‘slut’ is one of those words.
What are the things we associate to the word ‘slut’?
overt sexuality
what we claim are bad decisions based on the choices the individual decides to do sexually
no self-respect
low self-esteem
dirtiness
general lack of integrity
But all of these things come from the general understanding that sex = bad, and that a female liking sex and making her own choices about her own sexuality also = bad.
You tell me if that makes sense.
The title of this blog, as I have stated before, is the personal realization that I was completely content with the decisions I was making in regards to my sexuality because they were coming from a place of enthusiastic consent, integrity to myself, and of appreciation and respect for my body. If all this meant that society deemed me a “slut” then heck yes, I was most definitely a SLUT.
B) Pure
Ness and I began creating and forming the workshop in February. It was only near the end of April that we finally came up with a name that we both liked/agreed upon.
Why we like ‘Pure’:
It was a slap in the face to the “purity movement” happening in the states.
As we were trying to come up with a word that, unobtrusively, encircled both prepubescent girls and sexuality in a positive manner, we reached a roadblock. We realized that it would be incredibly difficult to advertise ourselves properly using the same words adults often use to describe their own sexualities.
Pure is one of the only “safe” ways to refer to the sexuality of young teens.
It presented us with a chance to redefine what “pure” means to a lot of people, which we imagined to be a fun, rebellious way to ensure young girls had a solid foundation to grow with in regards to their bodies and sexualities.
My personal history with the word “pure” is not a deep one. However, the virgin/whore dichotomy ran a very long river throughout my adolescence. At 16, I remember a dreadful feeling of shame wash over me when, in a conversation, my older brother-like figure became “disappointed” in me upon discovering my “flower” was not intact.
If that doesn’t scream purity issues, I don’t know what does…
And reading books like Jessica Valenti’s “The Purity Myth“, it becomes all too clear how thoroughly the idea of “purity” has the infiltrated our Western culture.
If you are not a “pure” (read: abstaining) female, you are shamed for being “unpure” (read: having an active sexuality).
There have been some qualms due to the idea that the word “pure” may be discounting the history of women of colour and how their own sexualities have been defined. And dear Ness (she is much, much more politically correct than I am, and I thank her for this) is in a state of worry that her and I may just be deemed “two more white girls doing it wrong.”
I’ll be the first to admit I am hopelessly clueless as to what is politically correct when it comes to race. Possibly due to my white privilege, race has not been an issue that I’ve had to think about all that much. I grew up in Toronto and went to some “white” schools, but also to schools where I have been the only white person in the classroom. Race was a non-issue for me; did and done and I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing, it’s just the way it was for me. I went to school for creative writing in a racially diverse classroom and I had the opportunity to hear written stories from each person. You’d think experiencing something like this regularly would have given me a great deal of perspective on different cultures and that I would be the epitome of political correctness … I did gain perspective, but political correctness has never been the topic at the forefront of my mind… (SEX…) though I am trying and learning each day.
Both Ness and I are on the same page: within the confines of the Pure workshops, we will not be focusing on race. The things we will be focusing on are innate and intrinsic moral characteristics that we hope to develop within each girl: while we acknowledge that people from different backgrounds may have different relationships with the word “purity”, we don’t feel comfortable discussing the idiosycracies of these relationships because they’re not ones we’ve faced ourselves. And that once redefined, PURE is a way of life that can be embraced by all people, if they chose to use that label for themselves — regardless of the ways society has or has not used that word against them in the past.
We seek to redefine purity as a statement that stands for a life of integrity, honesty, pleasure, communication, choice, authenticity, and personal power (even if we choose to have sex).
Body Pride is actually becoming what we ever so dearly need in this society. I pinky promise you. Ask any girl who has attended and they will only bellow in ecstatic joy of how much fun they had and will try their darndest to convince you, that you, too, should attend.
And with this, I bring to you: Co-Ed Body Pride.
Our first Co-Ed Body Pride will be taking place Friday June 8th, 2012. At this moment, there are 4 spots for men, and 2 spots for girls. If you would like to come and I do not know you, a friendly interview situation will be going down. Don’t get nervous – seriously, I just want to make sure that the environment we will be creating is a positive one and I just wanna make sure our head’s are in the same place… I’m fairly consistently goofy – the interview is nothing to get antsy about.
Rules in place for Co-Ed Body Pride:
1. Most importantly, this is not a sexual environment and never will be. I totally love boners and I think a well-lubricated vagina is a beautiful thing, but we shant be acting upon these urges at Body Pride. If you get an erection: awesome, I will most likely sleazily thumbs-up you and raise an eyebrow, but that will be the extent of how far we go. If you find someone damn sexy and they are keen on looking for new friends/sexy partners, I happily urge you to hit on them as soon as you exit the workshop.
2. Everyone must be naked. Sometimes we have girls in panties, that’s cool, I ain’t gunna force you to undress, and if that is your state of comfort, I’d rather you not have a panic attack and remain pantyed-up. BUT, due to the level of awesome that Co-Ed Body Pride will be, I would like everyone attending to be ready and prepared to shimmy down to the bare bottomed.
3. If I have more people interested than we have room for, all interested pre-approved names will go into a lottery and will be randomly selected. If all goes well, we will have another one and the names that weren’t selected will get priority over any new interests (And let’s be honest, they are going to be kind of epic, so we will have many more).
4. No couples. People who are in relationships are good to go, and the both of you can totally come to separate workshops – but, you just can’t come together. Sorryz.
Co-Ed Body Pride will be $45 (cash only) and will include food/(non/)alcoholic bevvies/and a professional photoshoot from my brilliant co-worker Khadeja.
BAM.
Yeah. I did it. Your very own nudist experience in the city without it seeming weirdly cult-like.
This is a thought I had after reading my dear friend Ness Fraser‘s post on internalized gaslighting – in which she discusses how she is always apologizing for having emotions, positive or negative. She is a lovely girl and I highly recommend following her blog.
First off, I need to make two points incredibly clear:
1. I am the worst with acknowledging my emotions in an external/verbal manner. (Example: Me and the boy played a game of rock/paper/scissors to elect who would have to say “I love you” first in the morning – soberly. Upon losing, I groaned and shoved my face into a pillow)
2. This doesn’t mean I haven’t had those things called emotions.
this seems like a nice depiction of some sort of emotion..
It seems to be accepted as a sociological norm that girls and women are the ones with emotions. With the wave of feminism, women’s emotions became a ‘right’ and into the shadows falls men’s ‘non-emotions’. Again, with grand generalizations like this, I extravagantly acknowledge that sometimes the roles are reversed – I, myself, step in as this example.
But even now, in front of me I have Eve Enlser’s (author of the Vagina Monologues) book called “I Am An Emotional Creature”, a collection of short stories/poems/monologues from various perspectives of teenage girls. The introduction of the book is a letter composed to an “Emotional Creature”:
Dear Emotional Creature,
You know who you are. I wrote this book because I believe in you. I believe in your authenticity, your uniqueness, your intensity, your wildness. I love the way you dye your hair purple, or hike up your short skirt, or blare your music while you lip-sync every single memorized lyric. I love your relentlessness and your hunger. You are one of our greatest natural resources. You possess a necessary agency and energy that if unleashed could transform, inspire and heal the world.
And epic beginning, she continues,
I know we make you feel stupid, as if being a teenager meant you were temporarily deranged. We have become accustomed to muting you, judging you, discounting you, asking you – sometimes even forcing you – to betray what you see and how you feel.
You scare us. You remind us of what we have been forced to shut down or abandon in ourselves in order to fit in. You ask us by your being to question, to wake up, to reperceive. Sometimes I think we tell you we are protecting you when really you are protecting ourselves from our own feelings of self-betrayal and loss.
And, when we get down to the bare bones of it all, women ARE emotional creatures. We are hard-wired for empathy and understanding. In the world where we had still had to hunt for our food, women picked berries, grunted amongst each other, took care of babies and children and the wounded, and maybe played some pictionary.
Psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen tells us “The female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy.”
Anne Moir and David Jessel of Brain Sex tell us “[At] six or seven weeks after conception… the unborn baby ‘makes up its mind,’ and the brain begins to take on a male or a female pattern. What happens, at that critical stage in the darkness of the womb, will determine the structure and organization of the brain: and that, in turn, will decide the very nature of the mind.”
Aka – a surge of fetal testosterone that occurs in the gestation of male, but not female, babies.
So, cool. We, as lady people, are hard-wired from six weeks after we were CONCEIVED to feel shit. Awesome, right? How can we apologize for something that is innate, that is a structure in our brains?
But as cool as it is to be all ‘emotional’ and to have scientific evidence that gives your emotions validation, there is another side of the dice to this game.
Much like I recognized that ‘Sex Anyways’ sex was not the kind of sex I wanted to be having, I equally recognized that feeling any negative emotion was not something I wanted to be feeling. For long, anyway.
You caught me. I was the chick reading Eckhart Tolle and Anthony Robbins and Deepak Chopra on the bus. The one you imagined meditated to Buddhist ‘oms’ and lit incense and who flitted from one place to another repeating a ridiculously cliche phrase like “This too shall pass” over and over again.
And there are portions of these books that, yes, are hilarious in their attempts to ‘heal’, but they come with an abundance of wisdom from people who have already experienced what you are experiencing. With such a wealth of knowledge at my fingertips, I lived in libraries for a few years…
Eckhart Tolle coined the term ‘Pain-body’, the addiction to unhappiness, “Any emotionally painful experience can be used as food by the pain-body. That’s why it thrives on negative thinking as well as drama in relationships.”
And I know this feeling!! I had this feeling. I had it the strongest when I was an angry teenager and something my parents did pissed me the fuck off. I totes had emotional outbursts – but they were so rare due to the icky flavor I got in my mouth when negative emotions happened.
Hey Mum, remember that one time I stormed out of the house around midnight, slamming all doors, and you and your fiance followed me out and he started screaming at me that I must have been on drugs? That none of you knew what was wrong with me or why I was acting this way, so obviously, the only logical reasoning was that I was altering my mind with chemicals?
That was a fun night.
But I remember how intensely powerful the anger was (because I was not on drugs, I was just experiencing an emotion and the intensity of it called for some accusations, apparently). And how badly I wanted to wade around in my self-made pool of fuming hatred, frustration and spitting disgust. I wanted to send a postcard to the entire world to inform them of my feelings so they could understand how unfair things were and see if anyone wanted to be angry with me (I don’t even remember what the ignition to this teenage drama was…).
“You don’t need to be particularly sensitive to notice that a positive thought has a totally different feeling – tone, than a negative one.” (Thats Ecky, again)
But here is the best part: you have the choice.
“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” – Shakespeare
And guess whose brain does the thinking?! YOURS!11@#
There are going to be things that happen to you that are going to ignite sad feelings, angry feelings, jealousy, fear, betrayal, shame, guilt, humiliation, fury, dread, stress. Anything. But it’s up to you to decide if you want to use these feelings as something productive.
I don’t know girls. If someone gave me the option to feel happy or sad, there is like, no doubt in my mind that I’d chose happiness.
What I am trying to say here, is that although we can defend our emotions and say “Fuck You man-society, I will feel this with all of my heart”, that this is not always the best option.
I don’t like feeling sad. But it happens. Life gives you what it gives you and sometimes this means that you will feel sad. And you shouldn’t ignore this emotion, because it IS an important emotion, but how you experience will completely effect your perspective on your life.
You have the option to think:
“I am sad. I want everyone to know my sadness. I am going to be sad for as long as I like and no one can tell me differently or pull me out because it is my choice to be sad.”
Or:
“I am feeling sadness. What a peculiar and unfortunate sensation I am experiencing. I thoroughly dislike this feeling, but the stuff that has occurred to me has made me feel this way for a reason, so maybe I should let myself experience for the amount of time that it insists on being felt, and when I sense some leigh-way, I can jump back in with feeling happy and excited again. But in the meantime, lets see what we can learn from feeling sad.”
How do you change your emotions?
Change your pattern.
A year ago I was in the deepest level of negative emotion I have experienced thus far in life. I don’t think it was too serious (again, with the being terrible at expressing myself), but apparently it was enough for me to have actual nervous breakdowns to the point of hyperventilation… It doesn’t really matter why I was feeling this way, a series of events, variable a+b+c= d type of scenario. If I could’ve had the choice, I would not have chosen ‘d’ to be the outcome, but alas, it happened anyways.
I was in a University classroom of 15 people when I started heavily bawling my eyes out.
I had a panic attack when my mother did my laundry and I couldn’t find my sleep socks.
I had no idea how to harness these emotions, so… I just started doing what I knew how to do best. Art. I put my emotions somewhere else that wasn’t inside my own body. So… This happened:
I think this is called sad....
I began to see what sadness and stress looked like on me. And I became even curiouser.
A few weeks later, this happened (Disclaimer: this is… just… hilarious. If you could take an angsty teenage journal and put it into video format, this is likely what it would be):
And I watched it over and laughed extremely hard at myself because I am a bafoon who really does not know song lyrics at all. And as I watched it, again and again, I began to see how funny my negative emotions actually looked. How unserious they could be if I let them.
And I began to ask myself how the state I was currently in could benefit me. How long I wanted to be serious about these emotions and when did I want to turn the switch and start to laugh at them.
The act of taking a picture, or filming myself dancing like a crazy person to a song that, at the time, ignited a lot of joy inside of me, put my negative emotion in a separate space. It became its own being and I could put it away when I wanted to and start to feel… normal… again.
If I was born to feel emotions, here they are. But it is my choice as to how they will effect me. This is not a woman thing. This is a human being thing.
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