Listen to Episode

Read Episode Transcript

This is owning your shit with Carson McKenna, a series in which I read for my journals. The series was recorded over a few weeks period in winter of 2022, and my dress is very sweet from friendship to having disorder to homophobia to loneliness. Why am I so afraid of being seen? Well, at the gym yesterday, I was cataloging my three greatest gateways to terror, and they are one, a first date, two, a job interview, three speaking front of a roomful of people. So acute are these fears, any one of them almost always necessitates the Xanax beforehand. All three involve me being seen as a sole subject, unable to escape or divert. This is my hell. My preferred state of being a solitude. I would almost always avoid an interaction with another person if I could. I would go to self-checkout versus the cashier. So many thoughts of mine are mine to enjoy without pressure of falling them back and forth with another. When I'm listening to a podcast, I'm always bouncing my experience off that of the guest. She drinks a lot and she's having sex, and I'm not. Is that bad? Is my way of doing things wrong? If so, according to whose standards. I would like to mitigate the terror of being seen. I would like to have my life experiences without incident. I would like to make a decision and line up with it. I would like to find my impulse for solitude and not question it. I would like my decisions to be stark and naked and remove my arena of ceaseless scrutiny. Let them be immunized from comparisons and what others are doing. What's wrong with me that I don't want X, Y, Z? This question is becoming nullified with every reinforcement. It just is, and I just am. I'm giving myself grace to do what I want and be the way that I am, regardless of what people in my age and what people in my gender are doing. Since pointing it out, my fear of being seen has shrunk a few rungs. I may need X and X while I combat that, and that's okay. On the One Night Stand essay that I decided to write, how can I take it personally when the One Night Stand happened with an assistant that wasn't designed to cater to our authentic selves? He was brought up to objectify me and to meet her as a man by his ability to score. When I think of him this way, when I think of the role that testosterone played, my compassion for him is infinite. He's doing what he's been urged to do. He doesn't see what he's done wrong. I know that when he sits back and thinks about what we did, he doesn't feel right, but he didn't know what else to do. He was doing what all the outside influences told him to do. That night that we were together, I see him as feeling safe to pursue all the authenticity and intimacy that he desired, but deferred for reasons regarding the hustle that he's currently waged in. But this random girl gave him clearance to be his authentic self in a dark hotel room that One Night. In my role in it, I decided to sleep with him to prove my worth, because I perceive him to be a high-worth man and a catch. He was verified on Instagram. He was a fast-talking sports agent in the vein of Jerry McGuire, and he was in for Manhattan. All of the above dazzled me. And let's be honest, I wanted to make it worth his while. But it was a violation of my own integrity, which is why that it leaves me so angry. I'm mad at myself for violating my own boundaries and sharing my body with a stranger who was so reckless with it. Thank you for being mature and evolved enough to go deeper into your anger, and figure out what's really fueling it. Thank you for taking accountability for your role in the situation, Carr, for resisting the urge to contract into victimhood. You're very expansive in doing so. And I'm your courage. I've liked boys for as long as I've liked food, and I've been at odds with how to consume both of them. It seems like whenever I wake up feeling defeated, and as though none of its working, the universe sends me a little telegram to help me feel supported. This morning I woke up feeling a little wild-eyed and desperate. I wanted my results, Janet, and I wanted them now. I felt frantic without them. I think my mind was sizzling up some drama about waking up alone. Wow! That's new. And that's, and that was combined with the immense of how I raised my own ceiling. When is my writing career going to kick into high gear? And I felt a little desperate, like none of it was working. Then I checked my email and saw that someone responded to me. They were still open to one of my essays that I mailed them, which is wonderful. I felt validated and I felt seen. So the essay on the One Night Stand is being received really well. It was applauded as being courageous, it was like and upvoted, and I realized that in my private moment, I was fantasizing about sending it to the guy. But it wouldn't be through an intellectual clinical lens, because I wasn't really removed from the situation enough to do that. At the heart of it, my shadow wanted to shame and blame him. But doused it in a bloodless, unaffected vernacular. That impulse doesn't serve me, so I'm not going to indulge in it further. I do have an appreciation for watching the essay scale and hearing about how it resonates. There is an honor and awesome responsibility to putting a voice to something everyone might have suffered privately. A sort of club or community automatically brought into being under the same letterhead, where their once was only loneliness. You thought the pain was yours alone to suffer and shoulder. Now you realize it's part of a collective. Now we have something physical to claim to gather under. Putting words to it brings it into being and makes it a place that others can visit whenever they need. And that's what I'm out to do. This just in Sean, the Uber driver, who DM me over Instagram, asking if I wanted to hang out and provided me with some good banter. Just as we were setting up plans, he told me he's just looking for a hook up. I just want to be transparent, he said, I have such a crashing temptation to make this mean something about my worth. For example, I can only attract men looking for hookups like him, Luke the red head, Love Cash, the Indian Finance Guy, the one I stand guy. Then I take inventory of all the times I was looking to exploit men for my own personal validation. Take their attention and validation, leave their souls and their whole beingness. I've been in a state of low evolution, taking whatever I could to cock the holes within me, using cheap fixes like alcohol and attention. Sean, the Uber driver respects me enough to be straightforward about what he wants. I'm also very big of my body. It's a part of my authentic code. Being attractive to men because of my body and femininity is a great high of mine, something that I know that I'll share with my partner someday. So here I've attracted a man. It's a natural happenstance of being out there in the world, exuding my femininity. And he is a fragment of what I want, the passionate part. I never thought he could be my partner. I just thought he could be a nice bit of entertainment until the real deal comes along. So I appreciate the transparency. I'm being respected by the masculine and desired, but honored for where I am. My boundaries are respected and my dignity is intact. The respect and trust I seek to continue building in the masculine is not in jeopardy because of this transaction. It's fortified actually. Okay, so here's another test. I've had them like the plagues of Egypt. I'm ready for something real now.